SQ3

Short for “Surface Qualcomm 3” or “Surface Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.”  Third-generation ARM64-based processor made by Qualcomm in partnership with Microsoft to deliver its perfect optimized performance, high-speed 5G support, and a long-lasting battery. The chip was developed based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and powers the 2022 Surface Pro 9 5G. The CPU has eight processing cores and a special NPU for supercharging machine learning and AI tasks.

According to the announcement by Qualcomm, the company claimed that the new 5nm architecture SQ3 (8cx Gen 3) delivers up to a 40% boost for single-thread tasks and up to 85% for multi-thread tasks compared to its predecessor SQ2 (8cx Gen 2). It also has an improved performance per watt. As a result, the Surface Pro 9 5G lasts up to 19 hours of battery life, four hours longer than the 2020 Surface Pro X.

The integrated NPU on SQ3 can execute up to 15 trillion operations per second for handling exclusive Surface Pro 9 5G features like portrait background blur, automatic framing, eye contact, and voice focus.