With Microsoft having announced its Copilot+ offering back in May, it began a period of exclusivity with Qualcomm.
It led to the first wave of Copilot+ PCs powered by exclusively by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors on PCs designed by manufacturers including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Microsoft.
Now, that period of exclusivity is winding down and Microsoft has confirmed that Intel’s new 200V processors and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series chips will add Copilot+ AI capabilities starting from November.
Intel’s 200V series processors, announced this week, include a powerful neural processing unit (NPU) that supports up to 48 TOPS (tera operations per second) for locally processed AI models and tools.
With up to 32GB of onboard memory, the 200V is “the most efficient x86 processor ever,” according to Intel, with a reported 50 per cent lower on-package power consumption.
“All designs featuring Intel Core Ultra 200V series processors and running the latest version of Windows are eligible to receive Copilot+ PC features as a free update starting in November,” added Pavan Davuluri, Corporate Vice President, Windows + Devices.
The NPUs in AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series chips, which were unveiled earlier this year, meanwhile can reach up to 50 TOPS for AI performance and have 16 per cent faster overall performance than their predecessors.
Copilot+ PCs have AI-driven features such as Live Captions (real-time subtitle generation, including translations), Cocreator in Paint (prompt-based image generation), Windows Studio Effects image editing (background blurring, eye contact adjustment and auto-framing) and AI tools in Photos.
Gamers can avail of Auto Super Resolution, an Nvidia DLSS competitor that upscales graphical resolution and refresh rates in real-time without hampering performance.
The rollout of one of Microsoft’s controversial AI features, Recall – which takes screen captures of a Windows machine every five seconds – has been delayed after it was believed that the tool was storing the captured data completely unencrypted.
Microsoft is working with a preview version of it with its Insider community and is tweaking the tool at the moment. It’s uncertain at the moment if the official release of Recall to the general Copilot+ user base will make it in time for the Intel and AMD launch in November.
