Meanwhile, Lenovo’s new Arm laptop pops up in Geekbench.
Microsoft’s Surface line of laptops is getting updated in the coming months and aside from the addition of OLED display tech, the big news is optional Arm variants of the new portable PCs. Windows Central reports that both the Surface Pro 10 tablet and the Surface Laptop will be updated later this month with Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs. The Surface Pro 10 will also get an OLED screen.
However, the really radical revision comes in June when both products will be offered with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPU. It will be the first time that the Surface Laptop has been offered with an Arm chip.
As we’ve highlighted previously, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is being pitched as the first truly high-performance Arm CPU for Windows PCs. Apple has proved that Arm-based CPUs can compete with traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD for raw performance. But existing Arm chips in Windows devices have been based on ultra-low power CPU core designs that haven’t expressly been designed to offer desktop-class performance.
In theory, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip changes that courtesy of 12 high-performance Arm cores and performance that’s claimed to be in the same rough ballpark as both Apple silicon and the latest x86 CPUs for laptops.
