'This product has three times more performance per watt than the Surface Pro 6,' Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay said at the event.

And Microsoft preferred to focus on efficiency, not raw performance, when comparing the Surface Pro X to its Intel-powered Surface Pro 6. The graphics performance is twice that of the eighth-generation Intel Core processor from two years ago or of last year's Qualcomm 850 smartphone chip, Qualcomm said. The companies didn't share many performance specifics, though. iPhones and iPads use Apple's own A series of Arm-family processors, and its future MacBook is rumored to be embracing Arm chips, too. The SQ1 gives Microsoft a bit more control over that future while telling software makers they'd better get with the program, too.Īnd it could offer better competition to Apple, whose influential designs already are tightly integrated. Second, they also let the company show consumers and other computer makers Microsoft's view of the future of personal computing. First, they're a serious business at Microsoft. Microsoft's Surface products, with their integrated hardware and software, serve a dual role.

That chip in the new Surface Pro X carries a message from Microsoft: It's time for laptops to get phone-like all-day battery life, but not if that means sacrificing processing power to get there. What we didn't know is we'd also get a new Microsoft processor, a Qualcomm-derived chip called the SQ1. We knew we'd get a bunch of new laptops at Microsoft's Surface event on Tuesday.

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