Another day, another win for the M1 MacBook. Today's news compares the new MacBook Air M1 with Microsoft's Surface Pro X and looks at the results when Apple and Microsoft put their ARM-based laptops head-to-head.

According to PC World, the M1 MacBook Air undermined the Surface Pro X, which we did not compare in our MacBook Air with M1 review. And these tests reiterate what we have already learned, namely that the new MacBook is one of the best laptops.

A few things to note: PC World used a Surface Pro X with the original SQ1 chip instead of the new SQ2 (which we were unable to procure). The performance of the new chip is only slightly upgraded from the original 3 GHz to the SQ2's 3.15 GHz, so this may not be the end of the story.

Nevertheless, previous reports have shown that the M1 MacBook also outperformed the SQ2 Surface Pro. The numbers also reflect that Microsoft's new 64-bit X86 application emulator is in beta preview, which Microsoft says should be an improvement. [The Surface Pro X's multi-core score of 2,734 is just shy of the MacBook Air M1's 7,454; PC World does not specify which version of Geekbench it is comparing, but Geekbench advises how to properly compare scores Geekbench 5.3 on the Mac, for example, cannot be compared to GB 5.3 on the PC, because Geekbench 5.3 on the Mac is not comparable to GB 5.3 on the PC.

Next, in the Cinebench R23 test, the M1 MacBook Air scored another mighty 6,838 to the Surface Pro X's 1,604. It should be noted that this is one test where the Surface Pro X does not have an optimized version for ARM, but the Mac does. This means that the Surface Pro X could do better with a new version of the software, but even though the Pro X has been on the market for over a year, the M1 MacBook is only about a month old, and yet the It's a little disappointing that there is no application.

More bad news for Windows on ARM: the M1 MacBook Air was able to run Rise of the Tomb Raider at a high performance of 60.6 fps (1,280 x 800, medium), while the Surface Pro X was unable to run this game at all.

PC World's tests also showed the Mac winning with the Handbrake video conversion tool, which was no great surprise given how Handbrake's results looked in our review.

All of this shows that the Windows on ARM project has a lot of work to do to catch up with Apple. Not only in overall performance, but also in application emulator speed, as Apple's Rosetta 2 showed strong results in our tests. If Microsoft's x86 on ARM emulation improves, it should have a chance.