Microsoft Surface Pro Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 5, 2013 9:00 PM ESTSurface Pro as a Tablet
If you can get over the bulk, Surface Pro is easily the fastest tablet on the market today. Apple has done a great job of making relatively slow hardware feel very fast with iOS, but Surface Pro brute forces its way to the top. Web pages load quicker than on any ARM based tablet and multitasking is just awesome on the device. This is where the power of Intel’s Core microarchitecture really comes into play.
Since the introduction of the 3rd generation iPad with Retina Display several folks have pointed out to me that UI frame rate isn’t always so smooth on the device. I personally never noticed because I found that most of the competition was even worse, so it always seemed relatively smooth to me. After playing with Surface Pro however and going back to even the 4th gen iPad all of the sudden frame rate stutters are much more noticeable. Playing around with Bing maps on Surface Pro vs. RT is like night and day. Even if you compare scrolling and zoom performance to native iOS maps on the iPad 4, Surface Pro wins out.
Scrolling in web pages, application install time, file copy time, everything is just significantly faster on Surface Pro than on any competing tablet. Oh, and it boots (from full power off) in less than 10 seconds. It’s really the combination of the great CPU performance and fast SSD that deliver the responsiveness of the Surface Pro.
We’re still lacking good cross-platform performance tests, but there are a few browser based benchmarks that I can use to highlight just how much faster Surface Pro is compared to anything ARM based on the market today:
SunSpider is our tried and true quick js benchmark, and here we see huge scaling as we move to Intel's Core i5. Regardless of browser used you're seeing a significant improvement in performance that directly translates to faster web page load times.
Moving on we have Kraken, a seriously heavy javascript benchmark built by Mozilla. Kraken focuses on forward looking applications that are potentially too slow to run in modern browsers today. The result is much longer run times than anything we've seen thus far, and a very CPU heavy benchmark:
Even when handcuffed by modern IE10 you're looking at almost twice the performance of the Nexus 10. Level the playing field with Chrome as a browser and now Surface Pro completes the test in a bit more than 1/8 of the time of the iPad 4, or 1/4 of the time of the Nexus 10.
Surface Pro manages to deliver almost 5x the performance of the iPad 4 here.
We have one last web-based benchmark: WebXPRT by Principled Technologies (PT). WebXPRT measures performance in four HTML5/js workloads:
Photo Effects: Measures the time to apply effects to a set of six photos. The filters are Sharpen, Emboss, and Glow. WebXPRT applies each filter to two photos. This test uses HTML5 Canvas 2D and JavaScript.
Face Detect: Measures the average time to check for human faces in a photo. WebXPRT runs this test on five photos and uses the average time to calculate the final result. This test uses HTML5 Canvas 2D to get access to photo data. The detection algorithm is implemented in JavaScript.
Stocks Dashboard: Measures the time to calculate financial indicators of a stock based on historical data and display the result in a dashboard. The calculations are done in JavaScript, and the calculated stocks data is displayed using HTML tables and Canvas 2D.
Offline Notes: Measures the time to store notes securely in the browser's HTML5 local storage and display recent entries. This test uses using AES for security.
We're reporting the overall score after all tests have been run:
Next up are another set of benchmarks from PT, but unlike the WebXPRT suite these tests don't run in a browser. Once again we're looking at performance in a handful of tasks designed to stress the CPU. Here the performance advantage continues to be quite significant. While Surface RT and the other Windows RT/8 devices still feel a bit sluggish, I have no performance complaints whatsoever about Surface Pro:
If I had any complaints about using Surface Pro as a tablet outside of weight, they’d be about Windows 8. There are still far too many bugs and quirks in the OS that just don’t make sense. I’ve outlined some of my issues with Windows 8 before. I think the UI works just fine for a tablet, it’s just the unfinished touches that need attention. For example, having to gesture in modern IE10 before being able to switch between tabs seems silly.
This still happens way too often in the Windows Store, no indication of what's going on just a blank screen
On the bug-front, all too often I’ll wake up the system only to have the lock screen upside down. And despite all of the extra performance under the hood, the time from when you hit the power/lock button to when something appears on the screen is just longer than on an iPad or Android tablet. We’re not talking several seconds, but it’s still noticeably longer.
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powerarmour - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
I think you are missing the point...This is a Windows x86 product we are talking about here, something that we know will eat it's own disk space in temporary files and other junk.
Android and iOS are a 'lot' more frugal when it comes to data usage.
finbarqs - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
I don't know what to expect... But it seems collectively, the surface has more bad reviews than good. In fact, anand wasn't even gung-ho about the device for the first half of the review. In fact, there are just the mentions of the limitation of what the surface is.So let's get one thing out of the way: battery life. average life I've read around the net is 3.5-4 hrs for regular usage -- which is probably worst than the yoga pad. Now i'm just thinking... doesn't the mbp have longer battery life then this? isn't the technology out there yet?
The surface would've been a different story if it had better battery, and came out with data plan enabled -- your favorite LTE carrier. This will make people turn heads more. I was excited to get one this weekend, but I've been put off by all the negative press...
Netscorer - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
What did you expect from Ivy Bridge based design where battery has to be squeezed in the 10" tablet? I am actually quite surprised the battery results come in as high as being reported. 6 hours of browsing - that is very acceptable. 5 hours of video streaming is better then most ultrabooks on the market.nathanddrews - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
This is a topic that I wish would get more attention. I've noticed screen tearing on nearly every Windows 7 and Windows 8 laptop when outputting to an external display, whether cloning or closing the lid. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA graphics hardware or whether HDMI or VGA is used. Doesn't matter if hardware acceleration is enabled in the browser, the game, or video player, the tearing still occurs. The presence and application of Vsync doesn't seem to affect it either.The only consistent symptom is that it is sometimes worse than other times. I suspect that Windows desktop composition is to blame in some way, but I can't prove it.
dragonseer - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
I was waiting for the surface pro, but decided to get the Vaio Duo 11 instead because of a few extra connection options, such as ethernet, HDMI, and I appreciate the backlit slider keyboard... Sporting the same processor and complete with a stylus, I was a mystified by your closing statement that "If you’re shopping for an Ultrabook today and want that tablet experience as well, Surface Pro really is the best and only choice on the market." ???Krysto - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
How many times did you redo your battery tests before you got those results, Anand?You usually get lower battery results than everyone else. But now you got some of the highest, while everyone else puts it at like 4h, at most.
$1,000 for a device full of compromises, and thick and heavy as well is not worth it.
tipoo - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
I find myself wishing the Surface design team would make a proper ultrabook. It could still be a tablet with a flip back screen like the Lenovo Yoga, just make the form factor an actual ultrabook rather than a tablet with a stand. That way they could integrate a better keyboard and mouse and potentially have a bit more room for battery and cooling.smalM - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
"Once again, with lower power hardware I see Microsoft being able to minimize this - but that’s a topic for Surface 2 Pro."And it will have to compete with the successors of iPad 4 and Nexus 10.
"If you’re shopping for an Ultrabook today and want that tablet experience as well, Surface Pro really is the best and only choice on the market."
That's a really small market place.
BSMonitor - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
Except, Ipad and Nexus can NEVER match a Microsoft tablet in one HUGELY important area for IT professionals, etc etc...x86 compatibility
Dekker - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
> x86 compatibilityTrue, but that brings us to the core question: Is x86 compatibility a killer feature? I'm not convinced. Two reasons:
1) Given that x86 software relies heavily on a keyboard and mouse, it is hard to see how the tablet form factor is going to work. Stuff like building spreadsheets and editing large documents is just torture on a tablet (I have tried and tried). I immediately grab my laptop or MBA.
2) I use my tablet for browsing, email, casual gaming, light photo editing and internet shopping. All of these are easily done with apps, none of which require much investment in time, money or file conversion. In short, x86 is an irrelevance for many types of usage.
While I could see some future for the PRO as a corporate tablet, the lack of LTE/3G must surely be a deal breaker for many.