Microsoft is introducing an entirely new category of PCs, and they’re all centered around Copilot+. Amid bold claims about AI-enabled PCs from industry leaders like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, Microsoft is kicking off the AI PC era with a new set of hardware requirements and software features that will take your PC beyond just being an AI chatbot.
The idea behind Copilot+ isn’t to have a bunch of AI features. Instead, the dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on a Copilot+ PC will run multiple language models in the background of Windows 11 — all the time. The models scan everything you do on your PC to provide context for when you want to control Copilot in the right way. Microsoft calls the feature Recall and says it’s a kind of “sensor for AI.”
This should mean that a Copilot+ PC could retrieve a line from a multi-page document you scanned a few days earlier, fulfill a promise you made in an email from last week, or track your web browsing habits to suggest sites and services you visit frequently. There’s clearly a privacy concern here, but Microsoft says that when Copilot+ is running at full tilt, it turns into an AI superpower.
Constant monitoring is at the core of a Copilot+ PC, but its big AI computing power can enable even more, Microsoft says. We’ve seen dozens of creative tools take advantage of AI, from Photoshop’s generative AI fill to Microsoft’s own AI image generation. A Copilot+ PC lets you perform these functions on your device, saving you time and limiting how often you have to go to the cloud.
To reach Copilot+ status, devices will need a minimum of 40 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI processing power from the NPU. That’s a huge jump from what we’ve seen previously, where Intel’s Meteor Lake only offered 10 TOPS on the NPU. Perhaps Microsoft’s strict requirements help explain why we’ve seen Intel invest so heavily in Lunar Lake, and why AMD has been bolstering its Ryzen AI prowess.
Copilot+ PCs, however, don't use chips from AMD or Intel. The first batch uses exclusively the Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus chip, both of which pack 40 TOPS of AI power. According to Qualcomm, these chips offer more than four times the AI power of competitors' chips, while still packing enough power to run games like Baldurs Gate 3 with playable frame rates.
While Copilot+ seems powerful, we’ve yet to see exactly what it can do in practice. Microsoft says you’ll be able to disable always-on AI tracking, and you can go through snapshots and delete them individually. Hopefully the new standards for AI on PC will go beyond the background blur we’ve seen for the past year.
