A new wave of technology has given Microsoft new opportunities. CEO Satya Nadella is making a bold bet to seize market share of Apple Macs through ARM-architected Windows laptops.

On May 20, local time, at a press conference held at its Raymont headquarters, Microsoft unveiled a new Surface series notebook equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip.

Microsoft releases the most powerful computer ever, with 58% more performance than the M3 Mac

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's executive vice president and chief marketing officer for consumers, stated bluntly at the press conference that the new Surface is “the most powerful laptop ever.”

With outstanding continuous computing power, it will outperform any existing device by 50%, including the M3 MacBook Air.

According to media that have tried out the new model, the Surface devices released this time are “a few light years advanced” compared to previous Windows laptops equipped with Arm architecture chips. According to Microsoft's tests, the new Surface has 58% better performance than the MacBook Air equipped with an M3 chip.

This time, Microsoft has simultaneously optimized the software and hardware for the new Surface. Microsoft not only carried out deep customization and optimization at the Windows core level to take full advantage of the ARM architecture, but also seamlessly integrated more than 40 artificial intelligence models into the system using neural network processing units (NPUs) on Qualcomm processors to achieve convenient edge computing. According to Microsoft, the new Surface is equipped with an NPU chip, which can achieve more than 40 trillion times per second, or 40+ TOPS operations, and provide long-term battery life.

The battery life of the predecessor Surface using Intel chips released in 2022 was only 8 hours and 38 minutes; while the battery life of the new Surface Copilot Plus PC almost doubled, reaching 16 hours and 56 minutes; the battery life of the new Surface even surpassed the 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which had a battery life of 15 hours for web browsing.

In addition to powerful computing performance and battery life, the new Surface notebook also has AI-assisted features such as real-time voice subtitle translation and enhanced image quality for intelligent super-resolution games for the first time. Microsoft has grasped the technological opportunities brought by the AI wave, giving traditional notebook PCs new capabilities.

It's only a matter of time before Arm replaces x86 architectures

For the past two years, Microsoft has been secretly collaborating with all of its top laptop partners to launch a series of Windows AI PCs powered by Arm chips this summer. They're called Copilot Plus PCs, and they're laying the foundation for an AI-driven future.

Since Apple launched the M1 in 2020, Windows laptops have lagged far behind the Apple Macbook series in terms of performance and battery life. Therefore, the launch of the new Surface is also a time for Microsoft to raise its eyebrows.

Microsoft has been trying to push Windows on Arm for the past decade, but it hasn't been very successful.

In 2012, Microsoft first tried to transition Windows to an ARM chip via Surface RT, but performance was poor and application compatibility was poor. Although the performance of the Surface Pro X launched in 2019 was improved, it soon fell far behind the M1 chip launched by Apple that year.

From a technical point of view, Microsoft has finally captured a window of opportunity in the Arm ecosystem. In recent years, with heavyweight software such as Photoshop fully supporting the Arm64 instruction set, mainstream browser kernels such as Chrome and Edge have also been ported locally to Arm, which has greatly expanded the software ecosystem and user experience of Window on Arm devices. According to Microsoft, 87% of the new devices run Arm-native apps.

Microsoft said that a number of OEMs including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung will launch the first batch of CoPilot Plus PCs using Qualcomm chips this summer.

Microsoft CEO Nadella confidently stated at the press conference:

Apple has done a fantastic job with the Mac product line, but we're going to surpass them. We finally have a truly competitive product.

It remains to be seen whether this chip architecture war will eventually cause Microsoft to pull back the game. But there is no doubt that under the wave of AI in the PC industry as a whole, it is only a matter of time before ARM replaces Intel's x86 architecture. If Microsoft succeeds in the card slot this time, it will gain a first-mover advantage.