We’ve been hearing rumblings for moths now that Microsoft was working on so-called “AI-PCs.” At a pre-Billed event, the company spelled out its vision, Engadget reported.
Microsoft is calling its version of Copilot+ PCs, which CEO Satya Nadella described as a “new class of Windows PCs.” These contain hardware designed to handle more generative AI Copilot processes locally, rather than relying on the cloud. Doing so requires a chipset with a neural processing unit (NPU), and manufacturers such as Qualcommm have been laying the groundwork with chips like the Snapdragon X Elite.
Microsoft is taking a partner-first approach to making Copilot+ PCs. Along with chipmakers like AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, major OEMs including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo are on board. The first Copilot+ laptops are available to preorder today and they’ll ship on June 18.
Microsoft posted on its Official Microsoft Blog: Today, at a special event on our new Microsoft campus, we introduced the world to a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI, Copilot+ PCs.
Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all-day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t really do on any other PC.
Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English.
These experiences come to life on a set of thin, light and beautiful devices from Microsoft Surface and our OEM partners Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, with pre-orders beginning today and availability starting on June 18. Starting at $999, Copilot+ PCs offer incredible value.
ArsTechnica reported Microsoft is using its new Surface launch and this week’s Build developer conference as a platform to launch its new “Copilot+” PCs initiative, which comes with specific hardware requirements that systems will need to meet to be eligible.
Copilot+ PCs will be able to handle some AI-accelerated workloads like chatbots and image generation locally instead of relying on the cloud, but new hardware will generally be required to run these workloads quickly and power efficiently,
At a minimum, systems will need 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, to accommodate both the memory requirements and the on-disk storage requirements needed for things like large language models (LLMs; even so-called “small language models” like Microsofts Phi-3, still use several billion parameters).
But the biggest new requirement, and the blocker for virtually ever Window’s PC in use today, will be for an integrated rural processing unit, or NPU. Microsoft requires an NPU with performance rated at 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), a high-level performance figure that Microsoft, Qualcomm, Apple and others use for NPU performance comparisons.
Right now, that requirement can only be met by a single chip in the Windows PC ecosystem, one that isn’t even quite available yet.
In my opinion, some people will be very excited about the AI that has been “baked in” to Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC. That said, I think the $999 cost will be expensive to most PC users.