Microsoft Floor Professional X vs. Microsoft Floor Professional 7

Alongside of headline-stealing new units like the twin display screen Floor Duo smartphone and the folding, tablet-like Floor Neo, Microsoft improve its bread and butter line up, releasing the Floor Professional 7 at its Floor occasion in New York on October 2, 2019. The most recent era of this now-iconic Home windows 10 pill — Microsoft’s Floor Professional 2-in-1 has been round for seven years now! — appears like a strong improve … and it’s not the one Floor Professional that Microsoft introduced.

Enter the Floor Professional X, an ARM-based 2-in-1 that makes use of a CPU created in partnership by Microsoft and Qualcomm that’s mentioned to be 3 times extra highly effective per watt than the Floor Professional 6. That’s some thrilling stuff, however is it sufficient to steal consumers from the Floor Professional 7?

Design

Each of those new 2-in-1s appear like Floor Execs. That’s an excellent factor, as a result of Microsoft has managed to take care of a novel appear and feel with the Floor Professional line whereas nonetheless maintaining it fashionable. The Floor Professional 7 is actually unchanged on the surface, with the identical 12.Three-inch PixelSense show and its Three:2 side ratio and a pair of,736 x 1,824 decision for a pointy 267 pixels per inch (PPI). Will probably be obtainable within the conventional Floor Professional matte silver shade and non-obligatory jet black. The Floor Professional X is barely bigger due to a 13-inch PixelSense show, with the identical Three:2 side ratio and a just-as-sharp decision of two,880 x 1,920 and 267 PPI.

Nevertheless, the Floor Professional X can also be thinner than the Floor Professional 7, at a wafer-like 5.3mm in comparison with eight.38mm. Each 2-in-1s are roughly equally mild, at 1.7 kilos (there’s a one-gram distinction). Given how the thinness of the Floor Professional X, we suspect that it’s going to really feel like a smaller system.

The Floor Professional X provides a couple of design methods that make it a extra enticing system than the Floor Professional 7. First, the Floor Professional X has an entry cowl below the kickstand that permits the person to swap out the solid-state drive (SSD). That’s a primary for the Floor line, and possibly a primary for tablets, interval. Additionally, whereas the Floor Professional 7 makes use of the identical Sort Cowl and Pens as previous fashions, the Floor Professional X has a brand new Sort Cowl with a slot new Slim Pen can match into for wi-fi charging.

Connectivity was enhanced with the Floor Professional 7, including in a USB-C port (no Thunderbolt Three) to go together with a USB-A port, a Three.5mm headphone jack, and the identical Floor Join port as on earlier Floor Professional fashions. The Floor Professional X has two USB-C ports to go together with its headphone jack and a microSIM slot for LTE wi-fi connectivity.

All in all, the Floor Professional X is slimmer and enjoys a barely bigger show, with some good design touches thrown in for good measure.

Efficiency

Right here’s the place these 2-in-1s are most totally different. The Floor Professional 7 makes use of Intel’s 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs with choices for Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, with as much as 16GB of RAM and as much as a 1TB SSD. That provides the Floor Professional 7 laptop-like efficiency due to Iris Professional graphics. The Floor Professional X, however, makes use of a brand new Microsoft SQ1 CPU created in cooperation with Qualcomm, that runs at as much as 7 watts of energy, with most processing achieved at 2 watts. The SQ1 has each a CPU and GPU built-in on the identical chip, and provides as much as 2 teraflops of graphics efficiency and 9 teraflops of whole efficiency. There’s additionally an built-in A.I. engine, as much as 16GB of RAM, and as much as a 512GB SSD.

We suspect that the Floor Professional 7 can be quicker, actually with a Core i7 and when operating native functions. The Floor Professional X might want to run legacy Home windows 10 apps in emulation, which can be successful to efficiency, and we suspect that whereas it’s quicker per watt than the Floor Professional 6, the Microsoft SQ1 CPU will nonetheless fall behind Intel’s 10th-gen CPUs on demanding duties.

Portability

Each of those laptops are skinny and light-weight and can barely register in a backpack. The Floor Professional X is far thinner, however weight is roughly equal. These are two of essentially the most transportable laptops (OK, 2-in-1s) round.

Battery life

Battery life can be an attention-grabbing metric to check as soon as we get our arms on overview items. Microsoft dropped its estimate for the Floor Professional 7 from the 13.5 hours promised with the Floor Professional 6 to only 10.5 hours, in reference to the quick CPUs inside. The corporate guarantees as much as 13 hours for the Floor Professional X, that means its more likely to be the longer-lasting away from an outlet — though that’s not as aggressive as another ARM-based tablets by way of battery life. Clearly, Microsoft is aiming for efficiency with the SQ1 processor quite than battery life.

Which is best?

The Floor Professional 7 will begin at $749 for simply the pill, and goes up from there. Excessive-end configurations will possible be effectively over $2,000, and also you’ll need to think about a pair hundred for a Sort Cowl and Floor Pen.

The Floor Professional X will price a minimal of $999, once more with out Sort Cowl or Slim Pen, and it too will go up from there. Each of those laptops are premium units when properly configured.

We suspect that almost all customers will go together with the Floor Professional 7 for efficiency. However the Floor Professional X actually provides an attention-grabbing various with barely higher battery life. We’ll have to attend till our full critiques to call our ultimate winner.

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