Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 leaked benchmarks could be good news for Surface Pro X

The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 could bring a big boost in performance to Windows 10 on ARM PCs.

What you need to know

• Leaked benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 show a massive leap compared to the Microsoft SQ2.
• The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 appears to sit between the Intel Core i7-1065G7 and the Intel Core i7-1165G7 in terms of multi-core performance.
• As with all leaked benchmarks, these figures need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Microsoft's Surface Pro X and other Windows 10 on ARM devices could gain a big performance boost in their next generation. Leaked benchmarks (via Notebookcheck) of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 show dramatically improved single-core and multi-core scores over the SQ2 processor (which is based on the same Kryo 495 CPU as the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2).

These benchmarks need to be placed in context before we dive into the numbers. Benchmarks like this always need to be taken with a grain of salt, as they can be incorrect, faked, or be for early models of devices that don't reflect the final product that will ship. These scores are also for a Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD), which means that the figures came from an engineering sample. The retail version of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 could have better performance, but the main takeaway is that the figures need to be viewed in context.

According to the benchmarks, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 earned a single-core score of 982 and a multi-core score of 4,918. In his Surface Pro X review, our executive editor saw a single-core score of 798 and a multi-core score of 3,100 on his device running the SQ2 processor.

The scores showed in the benchmarks place the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 between the Intel Core i7-1065G7 and the Intel core i7-1165G7 in multi-core performance. The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 gets 5% better multi-core performance than the former and 9% lower than the latter.

As expected, even a leap this large still has Snapdragon's offering fall short of Apple's M1 in the same tests. The MacBook Air with an M1 chip got a single-core score of 1,687 and a multi-core score of 7,433. Apple's M1 chips are so good that when someone used virtualization software to run Windows 10 on an M1 device it still got a higher score than the leaked Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 scores.

Even if it does fall short of Apple's M1 chips, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 could be a large leap for Windows 10 on ARM PCs.