Quick Links
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 7th Edition is one of the first Copilot+ PCs, loaded with different AI features thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series chips. However, despite the impressive specs, I’m holding out for upcoming laptops powered by Intel’s Lunar Lake chips. Here are five reasons why.
1Lunar Lake Chips Promise to Be More Powerful
Intel Lunar Lake chips are a game changer for the x86 architecture, reengineered from the ground up, starting with the switch to TSMC’s 3nm N3B process node for the compute tile (the same Apple uses for itsM3 series chips), where theCPU, GPU, and NPUlive. The CPU’s performance cores (P-cores) and efficiency cores (E-cores) now utilize the new Lion Cove and Skymont microarchitectures, respectively, thus delivering a higher instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput.
The company promises a 14% and 68% IPC gain for the newP-cores and E-cores, respectively. The new integrated Xe2 GPU also promises up to 1.5x more performance than the previous generation. Overall, Lunar Lake chips look solid spec-wise and, hence, formidable rivals to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series chip. In fact, Intel claims Lunar Lake outperforms the Snapdragon X Elite chip in CPU, GPU, and NPU tasks.
2Comparable Battery Efficiency
Besides performance gains, Intel’s Lunar Lake architecture also focuses on power efficiency. In general, Lunar Lake promises up to 40% power efficiency relative to Meteor Lake chips due to the various architectural decisions taken by the company.
First, the switch to a 3nm process, from the previous 7nm in Meteor Lake, is a huge boost for power efficiency for the next generation ofIntel Core Ultra chips. The optimization for battery efficiency is also evident in Intel’s U-turn to reduce the number of cores from 16 to half that (while reducing the number of P-cores to just four from the previous six) and disabling hyperthreading.
Another power-efficient move is the new unified memory architecture with integrated LPDDR5 memory and the new microarchitecture used for both the P-cores and E-cores.
3Better NPU Performance for AI Tasks
Since the Surface Laptop uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chip, it boasts 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS) from the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. However, Intel’s Lunar Lake chips are also ready for the AI future with an NPU that delivers 48 TOPS, 3 TOPS more than you get on the Surface Laptop.
In total, Lunar Lake packs up to 120 TOPS for accelerating AI tasks (including 5 and 67 TOPS from the CPU and GPU, respectively). Microsoft requires any laptop to have at least 40 TOPS from the NPU to be considered a Copilot+ PC, so more Copilot+ PCs powered by Lunar Lake are on the way.
4Running Apps Natively Is Faster Than Emulation
Because the Surface Laptop uses an Arm-based chip, you must emulate existing applications created for the dominant x86 architecture. Rightfully so, Microsoft has provided a translation layer software called Prism that does emulation.
However, even though that means you can potentially run any existing x86 apps on the device, I prefer running my apps natively because it’s faster. Among other factors, running apps natively is better because direct access to hardware allows apps to utilize full power without an intermediate layer.
5Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Has Limited Gaming Support
The 7th Edition Surface Laptop packs impressive power, as evidenced by different benchmarks online. However, if you’re a casual gamer like me who likes to play a game or two during downtimes, you may have an issue with the laptop due to its patchy gaming support.
As noted byLinus Tech Tips, some games work fairly well, others run but in a janky way, and some don’t. He notes that if a game requires AVX2 support or has a kernel-level anti-cheat system, it won’t work.
Another YouTuber, David, from the David Does Tech Stuff channel (above), shares the same sentiments. David tried to play different games on the Surface Laptop, and the results were mixed. Some games could run though fairly playable (sometimes even at a lower resolution). Some didn’t run but were able to launch after tinkering, while others didn’t.
TheSurface Laptop 7th Edition is a great laptop, no doubt. However, if you’re like me and are concerned about the limitations of using a first-generation chip, skip the Surface Laptop and wait for Lunar Lake-powered laptops.
Lunar Lake promises to deliver on both the AI and battery efficiency hype while still allowing you to run your favorite apps and games without worrying whether they’ll run and, if they do, whether they’ll do so efficiently. The chips will arrive in different devices starting in Q3 2024.
