Snapdragon X Elite and the New Era Battery Life on Windows
While it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of AI features coming to Windows in the new category of PCs called Copilot + PCs, my conviction has always been that the transformational battery life experience would be one of the most compelling reasons to upgrade for consumers and enterprises. Currently, the “more than all day” battery life experience is being showcased on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite systems which have–easily– the best battery life I’ve ever experienced on a Windows Laptop.
I have personally been testing the Microsoft Surface 13 Laptop powered by Snapdragon X Elite 12-core SoC. This machine easily has the best battery life of any Windows laptop I’ve ever used. Broadly, we at Creative Strategies, have been testing five Snapdragon X Elite systems between myself, Carolina Milanesi, and Max Weinbach. We have also been testing the latest from AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 in the Asus Zenbook 16″ notebook.
One of my biggest complaints about battery life tests is how they rarely simulate real-world usage. They generally always show you the longest battery life possible, which is accomplished by only testing the most basic of use cases. Things like just browsing the web, or just watching videos on Netflix, etc. They don’t tell us how long a person can expect to use the machine doing normal tasks like writing documents and doing a range of other very light computing tasks. So we decided to build our own custom battery life test that we believe more closely simulates real-world “light work” usage that includes productivity tasks and entertainment tasks. We loop this test from 100% battery life until it dies and have charted our results below. Also note, all laptop displays were fixed to 150 nits and no adaptive display or power saving techniques were used for the tests we charted below.
Key Takeaways
What this chart highlights is how much battery life mileage will vary across OEMs which is driven by design decisions they make for the specific experience they want to enable. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, and the Dell XPS 13 all have OLED screens of varying sizes. The Dell XPS is a 13″ tandem OLED (which is the absolute best-looking laptop display I’ve ever seen) but because of this feature, and the smaller chassis, it gets 10 hours of light work usage. The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge is also OLED but has a 16″ display and also has ~10 hours of light work usage. The standout for quality of display and battery life is the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x that got ~15 hours of light work usage but is also in an extremely thin chassis and is easily one of the best overall designs of the crop. However, it achieves its stellar battery life, with an OLED display, thanks to an–on average– ~30% larger battery compared to the crop of laptops we tested. The standout winner is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 which averaged ~16 hours of light work usage.
Overall, testing this current crop of Copilot + laptops has proven to provide ~10 hours minimum of light work usage on a single charge which is a large step up as an average to systems from a few years ago that struggled to get 10 hours of light work usage even at low-power mode. We ran all these tests in balanced mode in Windows to ensure the best performance-to-battery life ratio.
Comparing to Mac M3 Macbook Air
The primary question, competitively, is how this new class of Copilot PCs compares to Apple’s Macbook Air, which had continually been the bar in laptop battery life. As we can see from our tests, the Macbook Air M3 got 12 hours in our light work usage tests. Also, as you can see the base Apple Silicon M3 performs on par with Qualcomm Snapdragon 12 Core X Elite even though it has 10 cores. Apple MacBook Air M3 also has a fanless design meaning it is entirely silent during its operation because it is running at a lower wattage than competing systems which allow it to operate in a fanless design. This emphasizes Apple’s leadership in performance per watt with their M series chips, where they can achieve equal to, and sometimes higher performance scores while also running at the lowest power possible.
We conducted the most comparisons to MacBook Air M3 with the Surface Laptop 13 because of price, size, display, and battery size in Mh, we felt it was the most comparable system. The main caveat here is that the Surface running Snapdragon X Elite is running at a higher wattage and is the 12 core vs. Apple Silicon M3 10 core. However, despite running at a higher wattage, with roughly the same size battery the Surface Laptop 13 was consistently delivering the best results in our testing, regularly lasting over 16 hours of light work usage.
Besides our custom light work battery test, I used the Surface Laptop 13 as a daily driver for a few days and was consistently shocked by how long the battery lasted. It is the first Windows laptop I’ve ever used that delivered the same feeling as using my Mac from a battery life perspective.
One interesting thing we found, was while HDR is a key feature of the Surface Laptop 13, enabling HDR did have a drastic impact on battery life. With HDR enabled, running our light work battery test, the Surface Laptop 13 only lasted 9 hours.
We also compared the Surface Laptop 13 with Snapdragon X Elite in power saver mode vs. MacBook Air M3 13″ in power saver mode which only gave it around an hour longer of usage, scoring just over 17 hours of light work consistently. However, it does this at a cost of performance where the GeekBench CPU scores in power saver were 1651 for single-core and 7819 for multi-core. Meaning power saver mode induced a 26% performance drop in CPU score and a 50% performance drop in multi-core yet only provided on average an hour to 1.5 hours better battery life.
The MacBook Air M3 13″ in power saver mode provided much more battery life lift getting ~15 hours of light work usage. But, the MacBook Air in low-power mode saw a 58% performance drop in single-core performance and a 64% performance drop in multi-core allowing for three more hours of light productivity. We did the analysis this way simply to show what the performance trade-offs may look like just to get a few more hours of usage. In some cases, it may be worth it, but in other cases, it likely will not.
The Microsoft Surface battery’s stellar battery life highlights an interesting advantage Microsoft has that I hadn’t fully appreciated at the experience level until now. Microsft had always positioned the Surface line of computers as the best expression and implementation of Windows. If you want the best of Windows and the surrounding Microsoft experience then the Surface is the showcase and the hero product for Windows/Office, etc. It is for that reason, that Microsoft was able to tune and optimize Windows in a more tightly integrated way with the Surface hardware and those optimizations are a big reason for the exceptional battery life we found on the Surface Laptop 13.
Ultimately, this new crop of Copilot + PCs is a big step forward in battery life and efficiency. Those OEMs that focused on the longer battery life of a feature easily exceeded past Windows laptops in all-day light productivity usage. As has always been the case with the Windows laptop ecosystem, mileage will vary with battery life depending on OEM decisions in specific specs and features, but we think the base level of 10-12 hours (very light usage of just videos/web will yield much longer battery life of course) of actual productivity and entertainment at a minimum is an excellent new bar for the Windows PC market. While we continue to test systems from AMD and look forward to the upcoming launch of new Core Ultra products from Intel based on the newest Lunar Lake architecture, for the moment Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops have shown to have the best battery life of any Windows laptop in the history of the category.
About our Testing/Methodology
- All tests were run in balanced mode, with the display at 150 nits for the entirety of the test, and HDR turned off when available. No power saving or adaptive display settings were enabled to keep the display of the laptop fixed to 150 nits.
- The test was a programmed loop with automated scrolling for 300 seconds, and document creation/typing of 2500 words. YouTube play through a ~9-minute video and run through 3 synthetic tests to push different parts of the system. These push I/O by rapidly generating and deleting files, photo editing by generating an image and editing it, then stressing the CPU to use 75% of the total CPU cores aiming for 75% utilization of the CPU for 90 seconds. This loop is started with battery 100% and loops until dead.