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by dantiberian 744 days ago
The Surface Laptop scored 1,745 on the Procyon AI Score, while the MacBook Air managed 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has 45 TOPS of AI acceleration performance, much more than the 18 TOPS found on the M3.

TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) is a meaningless score without including the precision. Are they INT4, INT8, INT16 or FP16? Microsoft's qualifications for a Copilot+ laptop require 40 TOPS at INT8: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/21/qualcomm_windows_micr.... The new Snapdragon X Elite can do 45 TOPS at INT8.

Apple's M3 has 18 TOPS, and their M4 has 38 TOPS, but the M3 was measured at INT16 and the M4 at INT8: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21387/apple-announces-m4-soc-.... Cutting the precision in half lets you do ~twice the amount of work.

The Snapdragon is very impressive, but it's silly to see TOPS claims from companies repeated by journalists without adding some context.