Microsoft has unveiled Copilot+ PCs, a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI. The most valuable company in the world is calling it the “fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built”.
Copilot+ PCs has a powerful new chip capable of 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all-day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models and will give customers features that will be a first for a PC. Chief Executive Satya Nadella introduced the PC at an event on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington.
“We are entering a new era where computers not only understand us, but can anticipate what we want and our intents,” Nadella said.
Copilot+ PCs will help you easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with the ‘Recall’ feature; generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using ‘Cocreator’; and translate audio from 40+ languages into English with ‘Live Captions’.
Starting at $999 (AED3,665), pre-orders for Copilot+ begins on Tuesday and it will be available in the market starting June 18. A range of manufacturers, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Samsung would sell them.
Dell is launching five new Copilot+ PCs, including the XPS 13, Inspiron 14 Plus, Inspiron 14, Latitude 7455, and Latitude 5455. HP and Lenovo are launching two models.
In a blog, Yusuf Mehdi, Executive Vice President, Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, wrote: “This first wave of Copilot+ PCs is just the beginning. Over the past year, we have seen an incredible pace of innovation of AI in the cloud with Copilot allowing us to do things that we never dreamed possible. Now, we begin a new chapter with AI innovation on the device.
“We have completely reimagined the entirety of the PC – from silicon to the operating system, the application layer to the cloud – with AI at the center, marking the most significant change to the Window platform in decades.
“We are at an inflection point where the PC will accelerate AI innovation. We believe the richest AI experiences will only be possible when the cloud and device work together in concert. Together with our partners, we’re setting the frame for the next decade of Windows innovation.”
The PC will have an all-new system architecture to bring the power of the CPU, GPU, and a new high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) together. It’s connected to and enhanced by the large language models (LLMs) running on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.
Microsoft is using Qualcomm chips based on Arm Holdings’ architecture and added that GPT-4o, the latest technology from OpenAI, will be available as part of Copilot soon.
The company claims that Copilot+ PCs are up to 20x more powerful and up to 100x as efficient for running AI workloads and deliver industry-leading AI acceleration and that they “outperform Apple’s MacBook Air 15” by up to 58 percent in sustained multithreaded performance”. It will deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge.
Recall feature
Recall, which the company likened to ‘photographic memory’ for a PC, is the biggest new feature. If you have had issues finding something you have seen before on our PC – file folder it was stored in, or emails, or the website it was on – Recall will access virtually what you have seen or done on your PC and organise information based on relationships and associations unique to each individual experiences.
Users can scroll across time to find the content on their timeline across any application, website or document. They will be able to interact using snapshots with screenray to take the next step using suggested actions based on object recognition.
Recall is built and stored entirely on a user’s personal device, which addresses some of the privacy issues. Individual snapshots can be adjusted and deleted in settings or paused at any point from the icon on taskbar.
The Live Captions feature does live translations in real time and turn any audio that passes through the PC into a single, English-language caption experience.
Any live or pre-recorded audio in any app or video platform from over 40 languages can be translated into English subtitles instantly and even when the user is offline. This gives the users an ability to watch or hear content in most of the popular languages in the world.
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