Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC Just Made “AI PCs” Obsolete, leaving anyone who bought a 2024 laptop behind

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My explosive sigh of exasperation just left speckles of spittle all over my screen. Darn you, Artificial 'Intelligence'!

Meteor Lake and Ryzen 7000 not powerful enough. Okay... but not powerful enough for what? I'm still yet to get a convincing answer to the question of why any of this matters to the regular consumers all these things are being targeted towards. Finding a file from a few weeks ago? Back in my day we used proper filenames and folder structures.

Anyone seriously invested in speeding up their 'AI' workloads (it hurts my teeth even to say it), is probably just going to plonk the cash down on a half-decent GPU.

...

Yeah, I know I'm probably just being totally ignorant, but... I never miss an opportunity to be stereotypical old grouch.
 
So if we don't buy one of these weird computers, then we won't have this junk forced down our throats?

I'd call that a classic win-win scenario.

Sure, I might not exactly know what the new junk is supposed to be, but Microsoft is on a solid 4 year losing streak of every new product release being substantially worse than the previous version, in every way. The less "New from Microsoft" in my life, the better.
 
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Like others have mentioned in the forums, and I'm not sure why it's not added to these articles, is the absence of GPUs being able to be used for AI. There are a LOT of desktop PCs and laptops with a GPU that can put out a lot more than 30TOPs. If M$ is saying that you can't use them and that you specifically need a "new" PC or laptop with an NPU for the AI, I call BS, and a money grab.
I'm willing to bet it'll only be a matter of time before someone cracks the new Windoze to get rid of the "requirements" just like they did with Windoze 11 to begin with.
And also willing to bet that if M$ is "requiring" that a new PC has to have an NPU, that'll probably be cracked to be able to run on GPUs.

I have more faith in the modding/cracking community than I do with all these elitists looking for ways to take everyone's money.
 
Notton said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't an RTX 4050 have up to 194 TOPS of AI performance? Or is that only when it can consume 115W?
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Key to many AI features is memory bandwidth and capacity. The biggest problem for the 4050 (and up to 4080) is memory capacity. There will be many basic tasks that will operate in the 4 to 6 GB RAM range, but many of the biggest features will need at least 16 GB.

That said, bandwidth will be lacking on many of these PCs, including the Qualcomm ones. For large language models, and other tasks that rely on transformer or diffusion models, the 128-bit buses are going to hurt far more than whether or not the processing units are lacking in TOPS.

Strix Halo, with its 256 bit bus is going to lap all the other known competitors for Windows AI tasks. Higher end Macs have become popular in the machine learning community specifically because of the 512 bit bus and 128 GB RAM capacity of the Mx Max chips. even then, running the biggest, most powerful models is slow with the 400 GB/s 512-bit memory bus being the limiting factor.

Nvidia GPUs are smoking fast, but the top tier consumer cards come with 24 GB of VRAM. Some are using systems combining two or three 4090s and is still not enough to run the biggest models.
 
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baboma said:
Better benchmarks (than MBA) - Who cares? How about benchmarks against x86? How about some gaming benchmarks? What's that? No PC games except under emul? Gotta wait for game devs to make ARM versions? So, wait for say 3 years before buying ARM? Check!
Click to expand...
It was running Baulder's Gate 3 and 2 other games through emulation at a demonstration a few months ago.
Smoothly, I might add. No frame-time hiccups.
 
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>Like others have mentioned in the forums, and I'm not sure why it's not added to these articles, is the absence of GPUs being able to be used for AI.

The crux of this launch is ARM, and AI is the launch vehicle. There is no desktop for ARM; it's all laptop/mobile.

As for discrete mobile GPUs in laptops, those are mostly relegated to gaming laptops, which aren't in the conversation when it comes to portability and battery life. So, kinda like desktops.

>I'm willing to bet it'll only be a matter of time before someone cracks the new Windoze to get rid of the "requirements" just like they did with Windoze 11 to begin with.

I wouldn't get cocky. From the horse's mouth: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ
=====
Q: Do you plan to work around the new hardware requirements limitations of Windows 11 24H2?

A: ...you need to realize that, whereas Rufus does provide bypasses for Windows 11 installation, we did not come up with them. Instead, those bypasses were introduced by Microsoft themselves, and my understanding is that they were publicised by Microsoft employees, which in turn allowed applications like Rufus to use them.

In short, if your idea is that we spent any time reverse engineering the Windows code to figure out how to add the TPM and Secure Boot bypasses in Rufus, you are very, very wrong. We simply reused public information that was already available from somebody else, and that ultimately boiled down to the good will of Microsoft for providing these bypasses to the masses.

Therefore, unless Microsoft adds bypasses for the alleged new hardware requirements of Windows 11 24H2, or somebody else investigates and finds a way to work around these, you will not see Rufus add a bypass for these new requirements, especially as I genuinely have no plan to look into them at this stage.
=====
In short, yeah, Win11 24H2 will likely still get req-bypass as with earlier Win11 revs, but all bets are off for Win12.
 
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Don’t worry, I don’t feel left behind. Perhaps it’s a blessing my current PC don’t have all these fluffy AI gimmicks since it does not have the TOPS to run them. To me, I am only interested to see how well the Snapdragon chip works.
 
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>That said, bandwidth will be lacking on many of these PCs, including the Qualcomm ones. For large language models, and other tasks that rely on transformer or diffusion models, the 128-bit buses are going to hurt far more than whether or not the processing units are lacking in TOPS.

You're referring to LLMs as we know them today, not the models AI vendors are prepping for on-device use.

All players involved, incl MS, Apple (rumored), Google, and Meta are working small AI models for devices. These obviously don't have the breadth of general knowledge that LLMs have, but hopefully they can provide depth of domain-specific knowledge. Anyway, there'll be no talk of requiring 4090-level compute or bandwidth for these.

Win11 24H2 will just be a teaser, gauging from the vagueness of promised AI features from the MS presentation. The real launch will come with Win12, in '25, which not coincidentally is when the large wave of AI PCs will hit.

>To me, I am only interested to see how well the Snapdragon chip works.

Ditto. I'd like to see ARM do well in Windows-land, not because I intend to buy one any time soon, but because that competition will raise all boats.

Windows has been stuck in a rut for some 20-odd years. MS has tried many a times, in its endearingly clumsy way, to get out of this rut, to no success. Hopefully, this umpteenth time's the charm...and not just because I own MS stock!
 
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Neilbob said:
Meteor Lake and Ryzen 7000 not powerful enough. Okay... but not powerful enough for what?
Click to expand...

Powerful enough to sell you more stuff through increasingly embedded adware. (malware)

You see, Windows OSAAS is dead. Windows subscription won't happen, it can't happen. People genuinely would not pay it. But Microsoft isn't going to let go of the idea of monetizing you.

The way to monetize you is to serve you ads. The more advertisements the better.

You are the product now.
 
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mac_angel said:
Like others have mentioned in the forums, and I'm not sure why it's not added to these articles, is the absence of GPUs being able to be used for AI. There are a LOT of desktop PCs and laptops with a GPU that can put out a lot more than 30TOPs. If M$ is saying that you can't use them and that you specifically need a "new" PC or laptop with an NPU for the AI, I call BS, and a money grab.
I'm willing to bet it'll only be a matter of time before someone cracks the new Windoze to get rid of the "requirements" just like they did with Windoze 11 to begin with.
And also willing to bet that if M$ is "requiring" that a new PC has to have an NPU, that'll probably be cracked to be able to run on GPUs.

I have more faith in the modding/cracking community than I do with all these elitists looking for ways to take everyone's money.
Click to expand...

You're behind the times here.

Advertisements is the future! Advertisements everywhere! Start menu! Explorer! Edge! Hey did you know Amazon is selling a something thing right now for only $3.99? You can have one right now if you just whip out your credit card, and of course Microsoft gets a nickel off of this ad.

Microsoft is pretty close to done with caring about all of that just as long as they can serve you more advertisements. This has been widely reported. Windows is adware now. Welcome to the Brave New World.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/windows-11-is-getting-more-ads-in-the-latest-preview
 
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It's not worth it, Copilot is not only not worth it, but with the Monday announcement of the spyware for free on the laptops with new AI chips and possibly future intel and amd chips, yeah no.

I just switched to Apple/Linux full time.
 
Ever since Windows 95, Microsofts mission has been to hype people up over a new Windows release and get them to panic buy a new PC. With the stunts they pulled with Windows 11 and TPM and now with the new NPU requirement they are continuing that trend, people with a PC only a year old are finding themselves not meeting requirements and asking themselves if they want to buy a whole new PC again just to use Windows 11.
This is the kind of stuff that got me to completely stop using Microsoft and I'm never going back.
Mind you I'm with other commenter's not even sure why I even want all of this new AI stuff, I mean if you want to build AI into the back end of your favorite search site, sure, it won't make my ability to search for some odd stuff that I search everyday through the internet any worse, and it doesn't require any changes on my part. But I have yet to find any reason why I want AI built directly into my operating system. Maybe I am just old school, but to me my operating system should just be software that helps manage my PCs hardware and provide a GUI with basic apps to help manage my files and launch software like games and whatnot.
 
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