It wasn’t until the now recently unveiled Surface Pro 8 that the design of the Surface Pro X with its thin edges was adopted. The Surface Pro X was two years ahead of the design of the rest of the Surface devices. This closed compatibility gap was the incentive for me to test the Surface Pro X and thus also “Windows on ARM” and to see if an ARM notebook can be a reasonable alternative to the classic x86 device, as well as to compare it with other ARM devices like the new MacBooks. As a result, all apps that can be run on normal Windows should now also be executable on the Surface Pro X. the Windows version for ARM devices, recently got support for 圆4 emulation in the Windows Insider Preview.

Due to the different architecture, many Windows apps cannot run natively on ARM, but have to be emulated, which results in performance issues. However, the issue that arises with an ARM device running Windows is app compatibility and performance. Therefore, a notebook with an ARM processor should show a much improved battery life with otherwise the same hardware. The ARM architecture, on which smartphone processors are also based, is significantly more power-efficient than the x86/圆4 architecture of the previous desktop CPUs.

The Surface Pro X is based on an ARM processor developed by Microsoft and Qualcomm in cooperation. Now, Microsoft has had the Surface Pro X on the market for about two years, and it keeps getting smaller hardware improvements.

Microsoft surface pro x 13 review