{"id":43355,"date":"2024-05-21T14:48:42","date_gmt":"2024-05-21T18:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=43355"},"modified":"2024-06-28T15:10:28","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T19:10:28","slug":"microsofts-copilot-pcs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/21\/microsofts-copilot-pcs\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Warren<\/a> (MacRumors<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Over the past two years, Microsoft has worked in secret with all of its top laptop partners to ready a selection of Arm-powered Windows machines that will hit the market this summer. Known as Copilot Plus PCs, they’re meant to kick-start a generation of powerful, battery-efficient Windows laptops and lay the groundwork for an AI-powered future.<\/p>\n

“You’re going to have the most powerful PC ever,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, during the briefing. “In fact, it’s going to outperform any device out there, including a MacBook Air with an M3 processor, by over 50 percent on sustained performance.”<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

One of the big advancements is an improved emulator called Prism, which Microsoft claims is as efficient as Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer and can emulate apps twice as fast as the previous generation of Windows on Arm devices.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Overall, Microsoft believes 87 percent of total app minutes spent on these Copilot Plus PCs will be inside native apps.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

They also claim to have significantly better battery life.<\/p>\n\n

Martin Pilkington<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks are impressive, but when you realise it’s using 80W to slightly beat the M3 Pro which is using under 50W for the same benchmark (and both are matched by the M4 which is probably using much less than the Pro) I don’t think Apple it too<\/em> worried.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Andrew Cunningham<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Surface Laptop<\/a>—referred to as the “7th edition” in its Microsoft Store URL but simply called the “Surface Laptop” most other places—is Microsoft’s first traditional laptop with an Arm chip. The laptop comes in both 13.8-inch and 15-inch sizes and starts at $1,000 for a 13.8-inch config with a Snapdragon X Plus chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The cheapest 15-inch version is $1,300, but it includes a Snapdragon X Elite chip instead.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

As for the Surface Pro tablet<\/a>, this update to Microsoft’s flagship convertible is a lot closer to what Microsoft shipped a year and a half ago in the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Pro 9 with 5G. The new Surface Pro, called “11th edition” in its Microsoft Store URL but not in most other places, still weighs just a hair under 2 lbs, still has the same dimensions (and maintains compatibility with the same Slim Pen and keyboard covers), and still has a 13-inch screen. It starts at $1,000 for a version with a Snapdragon X Plus chip, 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an IPS LCD display; keyboards and pens are still add-on accessories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Martin Pilkington<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Looking at the new Copilot + PC specs I hope they push Apple to move to a minimum of 16GB of RAM on M4 Macs (especially given how much more powerful the GPU and NPU are)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Are any of today’s first batch of “Copilot+ PCs” fanless? If not, can any of them truly be said to have “taken aim” at the MacBook Air?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I’ll go out on a limb and say that today marks the beginning of the end for x86. Either the x86 architecture has reached an inevitable endpoint, or Intel and AMD are just unable to compete talent-wise. (Or both.) But as of today the performance-per-watt gulf between ARM and Intel\/x86 is no longer just an Apple silicon thing — it’s now a PC thing too.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The saddest part of the event were the cursory appearances — both by pre-recorded videos, despite it being an in-person event in Redmond — of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and AMD CEO Lisa Su. Their token appearances felt like Microsoft pretending they haven’t moved on from x86, during an event whose entire theme was, effectively, “moving on from x86”.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n