Well, considering how underwhelming Apple’s M2 has been, even if NUVIA’s first entry is only 10-20% off from Apple’s M series, I’d still consider it a huge win in my book. I did some digging this afternoon and found some promising results here below for Surface Pro 9. It’s not like Qualcomm has not been delivering huge gains gen-over-gen already. Meanwhile, Apple is sitting on their laurels with 0% IPC improvement from M1 to M2. Here is where we sit right now with the current players. Compared to Apple, Qualcomm even without NUVIA has already been making colossal gains with approximately four times the generational gains compared to M series (11% versus 40% for single-threaded improvement gen-over-gen; 21% versus 89% multithreaded improvement gen-over-gen). If Qualcomm continues this extremely steep trajectory of gen-over-gen performance rate of improvement, they will easily surpass Apple M series in one and half generations. As another note, on Microsoft SQ3 (using Geekbench 5 as a rough guide) emulated x86 performance should be roughly close to what native ARM performance was on SQ2 or how native apps felt like on the Surface Pro X. That’s huge, meaning running x86 programs should be transparent or mostly indistinguishable to most people. I can totally live with what the native performance was on the Surface Pro X for my x86 programs.
| Model | Single-threaded Geekbench 5 | % Increase Gen-Over-Gen | Multi-threaded Geekbench 5 | % Increase Gen-Over-Gen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple M1 | 1704 | 7207 | ||
| Apple M2 | 1899 | 11.44366197 | 8725 | 21.06285556 |
| Microsoft SQ2 | 801 | 3185 | ||
| SD 8cx Gen 3 / Microsoft SQ3 | 1123 | 40.19975031 | 6013 | 88.79120879 |
| SD 8cx Gen 3 / Microsoft SQ3 (x86 to ARM emulation) | 595 | 3215 |
Sources:
iOS Benchmarks - Geekbench Browser
Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench Browser
Microsoft SQ2 - Geekbench 5 CPU Search - Geekbench Browser
LENOVO 21BX0008US - Geekbench Browser
SD 8cx Gen 3 (SQ3 in next Surface Pro X?) already out, much better performance and battery life : Surface (reddit.com)