Luke Larsen / Digital Trends
Microsoft is introducing a whole new category of PCs, and they’re all centered around Copilot+. Amid the bold claims of AI PCs from industry giants like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, Microsoft is kicking off the era of the AI PC with a set of new hardware requirements and software features that enable your PC to go beyond being just an AI chatbot.
The idea behind Copilot+ isn’t about having a few AI features. Instead, the dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) in a Copilot+ PC will run multiple language models in the background of Windows 11 all the time. These models will scan through everything you do on your PC to provide context when you want to interact with Copilot properly. Microsoft calls this feature Recall and says it’s like a “sensor for AI”.
This means that a Copilot+ PC can recall a line from a multipage document you scanned a few days ago, follow up on a promise you made in an email from the previous week, or track your web browsing to offer suggestions on websites and services you frequently visit. Of course, there’s an obvious privacy concern with all of this, but Microsoft claims that Copilot+ becomes a true AI superpower when it’s running at full capacity.
The constant monitoring is the core of a Copilot+ PC, but the powerful AI computing power can enable even more, according to Microsoft. We’ve seen countless creative tools that utilize AI, from Photoshop’s generative AI fill to Microsoft’s own AI image generation. With a Copilot+ PC, you could run these functions on your device, saving you time and reducing the need to constantly access the cloud.

Luke Larsen / Digital Trends
In order to achieve the status of Copilot+, devices need at least 40 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI processing power from the NPU. This is a significant jump from what we’ve seen previously, with Intel’s Meteor Lake only offering 10 TOPS on the NPU. Perhaps Microsoft’s strict requirements explain why we’ve seen Intel investing heavily in Lunar Lake and AMD enhancing its Ryzen AI capabilities.
Copilot+ PCs don’t use chips from AMD or Intel, though. The first batch exclusively uses the Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus chip, both of which have 40 TOPS of AI power. Qualcomm claims that these chips offer more than four times the AI power of competitors’ chips and have enough power to run games like “Baldur’s Gate 3” at playable frame rates.
Although Copilot+ seems highly powerful, we haven’t yet seen exactly what it can do in action. Microsoft says you’ll be able to turn off the always-on AI tracking and go through and delete snapshots individually. Hopefully, the new AI standards for PCs will go beyond the simple background blurs we’ve seen in the past year.