Qualcomm Leapfrogs Intel & AMD To Power The First Microsoft CoPilot + PCs

It's an extraordinary accomplishment & an inflection point for Arm powered PCs

At a dedicated event on May 20 last, Microsoft launched their CoPilot+, a new category of Windows PC:

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 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.  

In a nutshell, Microsoft is pushing its already existing cloud-based CoPilot concept down to run natively on the local PC level, signified by the “+” branding. In the process of so doing, it has laid out its own definition of the AI PC, neatly summarised here by Tom’s Hardware

To be considered a Copilot+ PC, a PC must have at least 16GB RAM, 256GB storage, and crucially an on-board NPU that's capable of 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second, typically 8-bit integer instructions). NPUs are a different type of computing core that's separate from CPUs and GPUs. They're based exclusively around performing AI computations more efficiently than GPUs.

We discuss later why Microsoft is getting involved in defining a new PC category, something that’s usually more Intel’s style. Back to the launch, the thing that garnered most publicity in its wake was criticism of the Recall concept. There was a flurry of online reaction mostly focusing on privacy and security concerns. Here’s an example from Tom’s Hardware:

Personally I think some of the reaction to Recall is unjustified. After all, we’ve long had our browser history being recorded on our computers and the world hasn’t ended.

However, the remarkable thing that almost got overlooked following the launch was the revelation that Qualcomm will be the only company with processors that meet Microsoft’s specs and therefore capable of powering the first wave of so-called CoPilot PCs, namely the Snapdragon® X Elite and Snapdragon® X Plus.

That’s right, nothing available from either Intel or AMD. Not only that, but Microsoft (for its Surface & Surface Pro), along with all of the leading laptop OEMs, are launching a slew of new designs based on Qualcomm’s latest processors. It’s an extraordinary development and it could very well be the inflection point for Arm-based Windows PCs the world’s been waiting on for well over a decade. What’s going on? Let’s dig in….