[kd913]

Yawn, what is this ad driven nonsense, just give us a spec sheet. Who really wants to scroll through 5 pages of marketing drivel to get the details.

>From a performance perspective, Surface Laptop 6 is 2x faster than Laptop 52, and Surface Pro 10 is up to 53% faster than Pro 9.

The competition here is macbook and ipad, not last years stuff.

Why do the surface people keep hamstringing themselves with intel? I am confused to what shady backroom deal is going on but it seems rather silly for Microsoft/Surface. They can't compete because they don't have the most performant per watt, nor battery efficiency. They used to have AMD ones, and we know they work with them for other tech a la xbox, azure, etc... so what is up with the surface line getting this exclusivity?

[greenknight]

> Why do the surface people keep hamstringing themselves with intel? I am confused to what shady backroom deal is going on but it seems rather pointless for both parties.

Probably massive kickbacks or massive discounts. Just remember, Intel put out this graphic when Zen was just released -- https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Intel-vs...

[boxed]

Also because they know devs aren't on board to make arm versions of the software...

[dboreham]

They make ARM surfaces.

[bitwize]

Yeah... shitty ones. Microsoft just doesn't have the will to make top-performing mobile gear.

Or the oxygen in that space has been sucked out by Apple.

[infinityplus1]

Snapdragon X surfaces will launch in near future as well. Hope they are more competitive with Macbooks.

[pge]

Isn’t the issue there a software issue, not a hardware issue, in that a lot of windows apps don’t run well on ARM yet?

[bitwize]

The issue is twofold:

1) Windows on ARM's x86 emulation sucks;

2) Apple Silicon are the only ARM parts that aren't dogshit slow compared to desktop processors.

This is why Apple is building the future and virtually no one else is: Apple controls the entire hardware and software stack from the silicon on up. A hybrid hardware-software solution, in the form of Rosetta 2 plus special modes in the M1 and later chip to enforce x86 style memory access, allowed Apple to emulate x86 apps at acceptable speed.

[kd913]

They may get kickbacks, but if they want to eat Apple's pie it makes little sense for this kind of move which would massively hamstring growth.

Also don't really see the benefit for Microsoft for the kickbacks (are they desperate for cash?) at the cost of growth and potential DoJ scrutiny.

This sector is already a slim line that is dwarfed by office, windows, azure so what is the point in doing all of this nonsense?

If they want to grow their own silicon, push ARM, if they want to compete, do so. To me it sounds like kickbacks to specific people in the surface group which seems shadier.

[orev]

> The competition here is macbook and ipad, not last years stuff.

No, it absolutely is not. Windows software (the vast majority that’s used in businesses) needs to run on Windows, and nobody is doing real work on an iPad.

> Why do the surface people keep hamstringing themselves with intel?

Because no viable ARM options exist in the Windows world. Windows on ARM is improving and somewhat workable for simple things, but it’s not ready for heavyweight things (like virtual machines, a lot of development tasks, device drivers, etc).

Performance per watt isn’t the most important thing for many people. It’s pretty rare to need 12 hour battery life when you’ll never have access to a power outlet. More efficiency is nice, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

[kd913]

They didn't even give a battery life figure over here. That tells volumes at how good this device is.

Apple front and center on all-day, 18 hour battery life.

>No, it absolutely is not. Windows software (the vast majority that’s used in businesses) needs to run on Windows, and nobody is doing real work on an iPad.

We don't live in the same world as the past, connectivity is king and the heavy lifting can and should be done elsewhere. If someone needs to do heavy lifting on windows, they wouldn't go with this glued mess.

If they want cheap with discounts, this would probably fail compared with HP, Dell or Thinkpad.

Who is this product for?

[jiggawatts]

Specs: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-laptop-6-for-busin...

They're using Intel because there's no other option for a Microsoft product running Windows.

Also, Intel is rapidly catching up to TSMC in the lithography race, and will leapfrog them very soon, likely by the end of this year.

The top-end model uses the Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, which is this thing: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236851/...

It has 6 performance and 8 efficiency cores, with the peak frequency as high as 5 Ghz.

It's hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison because benchmarks are sensitive to instruction sets, available compilers, etc... but this CPU is definitely competitive with the Apple M3. E.g.:

Apple M3 scores 18,947: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M3+8+Core&id=...

Intel 165H scores 30,596: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+Ultra+7+...

The Intel laptop is 60% faster for multi-threaded workloads, but it is 19% slower for single-threaded performance.

PS: The Intel laptop comes with up to 64 GB of memory and it can build and run x86 Docker images natively. If you're a developer, it's the far more attractive option...

[fh9302]

Passmark is known to be a bad benchmark, something like Geekbench which has results that closely match with the industry standard SPEC would be a better comparison for real life performance.

M3: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/5411370

Intel 165H: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/5387822

Around the same multi-core results, significantly better single core for the M3.

[kd913]

Why would anyone be doing this on their glued in laptop? If they are needing a dev machine, are you really trying to argue this is better than the mbp, thinkpads, hps or dells?

You are claiming performance figures at what 115W max turbo? What is the max consumption on the macbook 55W on CPU, 33W on GPU?

If performance matters, they should be doing the heavy lifting remotely.

Most people will be using single threaded performance, and the key metric here for this product is what is the battery life. They didn't even give a figure for that which speaks volumes.

They didn't even bring up the pen which is the main selling point of this product (i.e. ipad pro but for Windows).

[infinityplus1]

Most people don't want desktops. So powerful laptops are preferred. Macbooks don't support Linux officially. But Intel laptops do support them. So no matter how fast and efficient Macbooks are, people will still buy decent Intel laptops instead of the best Macbooks.

[kd913]

Have you tried running Linux natively on a secureboot Surface?

If you are running Linux in a vm, both are fine.

Most people want battery life, and if someone can afford to get either of these devices, they would be better off renting their heavy compute somewhere else.

[e44858]

> Have you tried running Linux natively on a secureboot Surface?

You can turn off secureboot quite easily: https://parinzee.github.io/linux-surface-overlay/docs/Instal...

[infinityplus1]

>Most people want battery life

Maybe for their personal device. But for work provided device, who cares if it is decent enough. Most people just keep them connected to power while working on a desk anyway (in my opinion).

[hypercube33]

I'm deeply disappointed there is no longer an AMD surface laptop with one of the custom designs pushing for a mobile Xbox level of GPU (no ray tracing) just so we can do business and light gaming or video or 3d modeling or whatever when you plug in even. AMD has some wild igpu designs in low power envelopes so I'm baffled that Microsoft just bailed on the line. I have a surface laptop 4 13in AMD model and love it but it only was worth it on sale really.

[alisonatwork]

This. By far the worst part of Surface is 3D. Each time they show the improvements in the latest Intel range I get excited and hope finally I can just impulse buy a new game, but even if in theory the chip could handle it, the industry gives the middle finger to anything not AMD or Nvidia, to the point some recent games just refuse to start up at all.

Now I check https://old.reddit.com/r/SurfaceGaming/ before buying anything, and the results are always disappointing. I don't know whether to blame the game developers or Intel, because there are games that run perfectly fine in reduced quality, but it's such a crapshoot.

[jjtheblunt]

> Who really wants to scroll through 5 pages of marketing drivel to get the details.

Apparently “Nancie Gaskill” who wrote it.