Copilot+ PCs expand availability with new AMD and Intel silicon
The first Copilot+ PCs started hitting the market in May, but they were only available with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus CPUs. If you wanted a new laptop with AMD or Intel chips that could support all of Windows 11’s new AI-centric features, you were basically left out in the cold.
But that will soon change, as today Microsoft announced that the lineup of Copilot+ laptops is expanding to include new laptops powered by more AI-capable chips from AMD and Intel.
This is a big deal because when these new laptops packing the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 and Intel Lunar Lake CPUs hit the market they’ll be among the first Copilot+ laptops to run on x86 architecture, instead of the Arm architecture underpinning Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. And while Copilot+ PCs aren’t much different from regular Windows machines, they will get access to some special AI-centric features (like live captions and AI art generation in Paint) that won’t run on older laptops.
To qualify as a “Copilot+ PC” a laptop must have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of achieving at least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second), something that only Windows laptops packing Snapdragon X chips (which achieve 48 TOPS) currently offer. But now that AMD claims the Ryzen 300 series can deliver 50 TOPs while Intel’s Lunar Lake hits 48 TOPS, there will soon be more than Snapdragon laptops in the ranks of Copilot+ PCs.
The Snapdragon chips have helped some of the best Windows laptops (like the Dell XPS 13) achieve remarkable speed and MacBook-beating battery life, which has been a real shot in the arm for Windows. But the fact that the Snapdragon chips are Arm-based has meant that not all Windows 11 apps run well (or at all) on them, especially games—so getting some new Copilot+ laptops with the more traditional x86 architecture should be a boon to Windows laptop fans.
Multiple Copilot+ laptops from companies like Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung should start making their way on to the market in the next couple of months, which lines up with Lunar Lake laptops hitting shelves on September 24th.
Of course, there’s not a huge rush to grab them since the new Windows features unique to Copilot+ PCs aren’t going to be widely available until Microsoft rolls out them out in a Windows update this November.
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