- Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Asus to start selling PCs with Copilot+ from June 18.
- Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge.
Microsoft has joined PCs with AI features bandwagon and adding Copilot+ into products across its business to take on Apple.
Chief Executive Satya Nadella said that Microsoft and a range of manufacturers would sell them, including Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Asus, after introducing its “Copilot+” at its Redmond campus.
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.
Users can 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.
Beginning a new chapter with AI
Able to handle more artificial intelligence tasks without calling on cloud data centres, the new computers will start at $999 and begin shipping on June 18.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series is the exclusive platform to power the Copilot+ PCs, but more chipmakers, such as Intel, are set to join soon.
Yusuf Mehdi, who heads up consumer marketing for Microsoft, said the 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 centre, marking the most significant change to the Window platform in decades.”
Moreover, he said that they are up to 20 times more powerful and up to 100 times as efficient for running AI workloads and deliver industry-leading AI acceleration.
“They outperform Apple’s MacBook Air 15 by up to 58 per cent in sustained multithreaded performance, all while delivering all-day battery life. With incredible efficiency, Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge. That is up to 20 per cent more battery in local video playback than the MacBook Air 15,” he said.
GPT-4o to be available soon
The company expects that 50 million AI PCs will be purchased over the next year. At the press event, Mehdi said faster AI assistants that run directly on a PC will be “the most compelling reason to upgrade your PC in a long time.”
Research firm Gartner estimates that 54.5 million AI PCs will be shipped globally by the end of 2024 while International Data Corporation (IDC) data show that shipments to grow from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to more than 167 million in 2027.
“As we enter a new year, the hype around generative AI has reached a fever pitch, and the PC industry is running fast to capitalise on the expected benefits of bringing AI capabilities down from the cloud to the client,” Tom Mainelli, group vice president, Devices and Consumer Research, said.
Microsoft executives also said that GPT-4o, the latest technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, will “soon” be available as part of Copilot.
At the event, Microsoft also introduced a new generation of its own Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop that feature Qualcomm chips based on Arm Holdings’ architecture. It also introduced a technology called Prism that will help software written for Intel and AMD chips run on chips made with Arm technology.
Customers can choose between a 13.8-15 inches display and four stunning colours, providing up to 22 hours of local video playback on Surface Laptop 15” or up to 20 hours on Surface Laptop13.8” on top of all-new AI experiences.