We took the opportunity once again to see how the Surface Pro X and its SQ1 chip, with the beta X86 emulator, compares against a suite of Windows laptops. Here, too, we ran into compatibility issues. Mark Hachman / IDG Microsoft’s SQ1 versus other Windows laptops Instead, we ran the HP Pavilion on the benchmark at 1280×800 resolution (Medium settings) to compare against the MacBook M1. We’d like to say that we were able to run Rise of the Tomb Raider, part of our test suite for gaming PCs, but the Surface Pro X simply wouldn’t. The MacBook Air M1 is more than six times faster than the Surface Pro X in video transcoding. Mark Hachman / IDGĪlthough we’re using different versions of HandBrake in our comparison, the tool is not the difference here. Apple’s MacBook M1 simply blows away the Surface Pro X.
The SQ1 chugged along at about a frame per second, taking about two hours to transcode a 12-minute 4K video, Tears of Steel, into a 1080p H.265 format. But the version is not the real difference here. We used the last public version, 1.33, for our Windows test. Its latest version, version 1.4, is written specifically for MacOS, to accommodate the new M1 processors. HandBrake is an open-source video transcoding tool, and a popular benchmark. In pure CPU performance as measured by Cinebench, Apple’s M1 holds more than a fourfold performance advantage over the Surface Pro X and Microsoft’s SQ1. But these benchmarks provide insight into just how slowly the Surface Pro X and its SQ1 chip run with the new 64-bit X86 instruction emulator layered on top. We hewed closely to the test suite from Macworld’s MacBook Air review, including GeekBench 5, Cinebench R23, HandBrake, and a representative game, Rise of the Tomb Raider. We added a third Windows laptop for reference: the HP Pavilion x360 Convertible 14, a decidedly average $700 laptop with a fairly pedestrian Core i5-1035G1 inside. We already had a good idea of how slow Microsoft’s Surface Pro X is-that was evident from our original review. (Microsoft warned that not every app would work, even with its emulator.) We used Apple’s MacBook Air (M1) as a comparison. (We did not have an SQ2-powered Surface Pro X to test.) We downloaded and installed Windows Insider Build 21277 and the additional code, such as Adreno GPU drivers, to allow 64-bit X86 apps to run. Our testbed was Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, running on a first-generation SQ1 chip, a more powerful version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx. Jason Cross/IDGĪpple and its M1-powered MacBook Air have accomplished what Microsoft hasn’t: delivering a viable new Arm ecosystem of hardware and software.
Now that Microsoft has shipped its own 64-bit emulator, we can more directly compare how well Windows on Arm compares to Mac OS on Arm. Given the glowing reviews by our sister site, Macworld, we know how well the new MacBook Air (M1) and other M1-based hardware performed.