Microsoft's Pano Panay makes the claim that the Surface Book with a discreet GPU is twice as powerful as the latest 13-inch MacBook Pro. Microsoft During its big event on Tuesday, Microsoft made a big claim that the new Surface Book laptops are twice as powerful as the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

This is because of a part called a discreet GPU, or graphics card. It's a standalone component that takes on graphics-heavy tasks, like playing games and editing/rendering photos and video. It lets the processor (CPU) run your computer without being "distracted" by processing anything visual that you see on the screen.

But GPUs are only beneficial for people who play graphics-heavy games or use advanced photo and video editors.

Indeed, it's a fair assessment that a Surface Book laptop with a GPU is more powerful than the 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro, because no model of the 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with a GPU.

The problem with Microsoft's comparison is that you have to get the $1,899 Surface Book to get double the power of even the cheapest MacBook Pro, which goes for $1,299.

Otherwise, the $1,499 base model Surface book, which doesn't have a GPU, is technically less powerful than the similarly priced mid-tier $1,499 13-inch MacBook Pro. In fact, the base Surface Book model is slightly less powerful than the base 13-inch MacBook Pro model, too, which is less expensive at $1,299.

That's because the base and mid-tier 13-inch MacBook Pros use a 2.7GHz Intel i5 processor (CPU) while the Surface Book runs on a 2.4GHz Intel i5 CPU. Technically, the higher the gigahertz, the faster it is.

The discreet GPU in the $1,899 Surface Book. Microsoft

Of course, there are a lot of other factors that come into play when comparing a computer's performance, like RAM, hard drives, and even the operating systems.

At the end of the day, it's unlikely that you'd be able to tell much of a perceivable difference in performance between the Surface Book and the MacBook Pro.