Microsoft at its event introduced Copilot+ PCs designed for AI promising 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models.
Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus powered Copilot+ PCs
Qualcomm is the first company to partner with Microsoft for the Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite that promise the highest NPU performance per watt for laptops, which Qualcomm says is up to 2.6X vs. M3 and up to 5.4X vs. Core Ultra 7.
With the integrated Qualcomm Hexagon NPU architecture, it promises up to 24 TOPS/watt peak performance in uses cases like Super Resolution and with Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Snapdragon X Elite leads in performance per watt, matching competitor peak PC CPU performance at 60% less power, says Qualcomm.
Microsoft also said that Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge. That is up to 20% more battery in local video playback than the MacBook Air 15″ M3, said the company.
Copilot+ PCs from Intel and AMD soon
In the future, Microsoft will partner with Intel and AMD, starting with Lunar Lake and Strix for Copilot+ PCs. Intel has already announced Lunar Lake processors will arrive in Q3 2024. AMD’s Zen 5-based Strix will arrive later this year, but the exact time frame is not available yet. We should get more details at AMD’s Computex 2024 event on June 3rd.
Microsoft expects to see these devices paired with powerful graphics cards like NVIDIA GeForce RTX and AMD Radeon, targeted at advanced gamers and creators in the future.
Native Arm64 experience on Windows Copilot+ PCs
Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word, Excel, OneDrive and OneNote. Chrome, Spotify, Zoom, WhatsApp, Blender, Affinity Suite, DaVinci Resolve and many more now run natively on Arm with additional apps, like Slack, releasing later this year. Adobe apps Illustrator, Premiere Pro and more are coming this summer.
87% of the total app minutes people spend in apps today have native Arm versions. With a powerful new emulator, Prism, these apps run great, whether native or emulated, said Microsoft
Recall
With the new Recall feature in Copilot+ PCs, you can find what you’ve seen on your PC using the clues you remember. You can use natural language to search, or scroll back through time, and get back to what you need to find through text and visual matches. All stored locally, with privacy and controls built-in, said the company.
AI-powered image creation and editing in Paint and Photos
Using Cocreator in Paint, you can use your ink strokes and words to describe the image you want to create, making it easier to create, refine and evolve your ideas in near real time.
With Restyle Image, you can reimagine your personal photos with a new style combining image generation and photo editing in Photos. You can use a pre-set style like Cyberpunk or Claymation to change the background, foreground or full picture to create an entirely new image. You can also get visual inspiration with Image Creator in Photos.
Super Resolution that will let you restore old photos and AI narrator to tell a story based on your photos will be available for Photos soon. These features powered by Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are built into the Windows, and are free.
Live Captions
Live Captions now has live translations and will turn any audio that passes through your PC into a single, English-language caption experience, in real time across all the apps.
You can translate any live or pre-recorded audio in any app or video platform from over 40 languages into English subtitles instantly, automatically and even while you’re offline, with support for more languages coming soon.
Copilot+ PCs from OEMs
In addition to the new Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, the company has partnered with several OEMs such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung for Copilot+ PCs starting at USD 999 with pre-orders beginning today and availability starting on June 18th.