While the total Passmark score is a good predictor of performance with true multitasking workloads, for straight speech to text, the best predictor of Dragon NaturallySpeaking responsiveness is the single thread ranking. As you can see below the processor in your Sony VAIO is about 80% of the single thread processing power of your Intel Xeon based machine.
Now a typical day I will use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for 12+ hours. I switch between my Sony VAIO, a custom overclocked hex core machine with a single thread rating of approximately 2400, and an older Lenovo quadcore workstation laptop with a single thread rating of approximately 1589
Http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3-1275+%40+3.40GHz&id=1205
Intel Xeon E3-1275 @ 3.40GHz
Average CPU Mark 8350
Single Thread Rating: 1932
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu … mp;id=1937
Intel Core i7-4500U @ 1.80GHz
Average CPU Mark 3795
Single Thread Rating: 1578
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu … 40+2.40GHz
Intel Core i7-2760QM @ 2.40GHz
Average CPU Mark 6644
Single Thread Rating: 1589
Using Dragon to control heavyweight corporate IT applications that are running directly on your laptop will require multicore machines and faster processors.
However, if you are using Dragon Legal you are not going to run across these programs. For straight speech to text, into email or reasonable sized Microsoft Word documents there is no difference in responsiveness within the "blink of an eye" (which is a little under 200 ms.) between the above processors
However, if you insist on running many other other background processes on the same machine, you will run into occasional to frequent unexplained slowdowns. For best Dragon responsiveness, irrespective of how powerful your machine is, you'll get the most consistent performance when you just use Dragon alone with whatever your text editing program is. There have been many threads on this forum discussing the various unpredictable behaviors that can occur when Dragon is running on a machine with many other programs and processes of the same time.
Also, there are some third-party command programs that under certain circumstances will have noticeable latency that can be improved somewhat with faster machines.
To reemphasize something from my last post, microphones that are suitable for Skype are unlikely to be sufficiently noise rejecting to work well with Dragon if your dictation environment has a lot of background noise. Very inexpensive microphones will work well with Dragon under ideal conditions, but recognition and responsiveness drops off dramatically with these microphones in more unforgiving environments.
I have played around with the Surface Pro 4 and Dragon. It seems to be a very well-designed machine. The array microphone on this machine actually works quite well for Dragon in a very quiet environment. As you can see from the Passmark reference below, the single thread performance is roughly equivalent to your Xeon-based machine.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu … 40+2.20GHz
Intel Core i7-6650U @ 2.20GHz
Average CPU Mark 4882
Single Thread Rating: 1849
For the time being, I would stay away from the Core M processors as the technology that is used to allow them to run at very low power makes for a rather unpleasant Dragon experience.
Again, my apologies for replying in English.
Phil Schaadt