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We've been hearing rumblings for months now that Microsoft was working on so-called "AI PCs." At a pre-Build event, the company spelled out its vision.
Microsoft is calling its version 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 Qualcomm 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.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, said during the event that the company has completely reimagined what a Windows PC is. He claimed that Copilot PCs are the most powerful PCs ever (we'll need to see if that assertion holds up in real-world testing). Despite that, Mehdi said, the first generation of laptops are "unbelievably thin, light and beautiful."
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Microsoft is also calling these the Surface Pro 11th Edition and the Surface Laptop 7th Edition.
Both the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop are the consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 for Business and the Surface Laptop 6 for Business, which debuted in March. Those chips included more conventional Core Ultra chips inside.
The two new Surfaces use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, a chip licensed from Arm. Nine PC makers signed on to use the Snapdragon X Elite chip, including heavyweights like Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft. The X Elite has already proven to be extremely fast and even the new Snapdragon X Plus derivative still outperforms a Core Ultra, Qualcomm claims. Battery life was always the Snapdragon's strong suit. Now Windows on Arm PCs have an opportunity to combine long battery life with competitive performance.
And what does this new Windows on Arm generation mean? For one thing, Arm executives are claiming that the days of laggy, incompatible Windows on Arm apps are basical
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And that's not all. The Dell Latitude 7455 uses the Snapdragon X Elite, and the slower, slightly less powerful Snapdragon X Plus will ship as part of the Latitude 7455, too, as well as the Latitude 5455, Inspiron 14 and Inspiron 14 Plus.
We knew that Dell had signed up to use the Snapdragon X Elite as early as last October, when nine PC makers committed to supporting Qualcomm's new X Elite processor. We didn't know as much about the Snapdragon X Plus, which uses a cut-down version of the Elite without the turbo boost options. But it seems that Dell is even more committed to the X Plus than the X Elite.
Presumably, these will be Copilot PCs, offering the AI benefits of features that Microsoft announced Monday Those include Recall, which will allow you to hunt down information on an explorable timeline; Live Captions with AI-generated captions of streamed audio; Auto Super Resolution; and Cocreator, the AI art generator within Microsoft Paint. All have Copilot keys.
Dell XPS 13 9345
The Dell XPS 13 9345 goes on sale today, but will ship "later this year," Dell says, for a starting price of $1,299.
On paper, Dell's Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 is very similar to the existing
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