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Introducing Copilot+ PCs

blogs.microsoft.com

71–80 of 614 posts

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#72

I suspect that there will be a LOT of TPU e-waste in about 3-5 years. One can call me reactionary, but I see a greater benefit in providing SIMD primitives for known bottlenecks, co-processing for known inner loops, than to continually jump through the hoop of committing passing trends to hardware. I suspect thst Microsoft will implement brilliantly on a bad idea, but that it still won't gain much traction, as Co-pil…

If vendors will go for strictly on-die TPUs, then maybe. However, I expect these machines to be quite capable without the AI hype.

I hope ar least some laptop vendors will use PCIe cards for their TPUs so that there's an upgrade path of sorts, and reusing older cards for simpler models remains possible.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#73
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been consistently trying to give ARM a try since the surface RT. Consumers are not going to bite. marginal power saving is not meaningful.

The first iteration of Windows ARM didn't have any x86 emulation layer, so that one was doomed from the start. The second iteration did, but it initially couldn't run 64bit apps and the performance was poor. They do have 64bit support now and it sounds like the emulation performance has come a long way.

Here is my question though, comparing how this works on Mac.

Will Windows have the opposite? ARM running on x86?

I continue to wonder how Microsoft expects to work long term. Are they expecting that every developer is just going to keep x86 and ARM based app perpetually or users be stuck always using that emulation layer if they are running ARM?

Microsoft won't be able to 100% transition to ARM like Mac did. At some point all Intel Mac's will be old enough to no longer get the latest version of Mac and for developers to stop targeting and they drop Intel support.

I just don't see many developers bothering with an ARM native Windows version when doing so means they have to support both or risk annoying customers later.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#74

The AI is the least interesting part of this announcement. Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality. That's possibly huge news.

Microsoft has been consistently trying to give ARM a try since the surface RT. Consumers are not going to bite. marginal power saving is not meaningful.

No one cares for power saving. Turn it into higher performance at same power usage and people will bite. Of course it has to actually be a real upgrade like the Apple Silicon chips were.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#76
Is this is it or did they already lock down "their" hardware so you wouldn't be able to install alongside or solely another operating system? It seems that it's something we shouldn't take for granted as of now that the separation of OS and hardware allows you to install Linux or any other homebrew operating system on "your" computer.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#77
To really be an AI PC, I'd want to be able to run something like llama 3 70B locally, and that's going to need a lot of RAM. Even running a 7B will take 14GB if it's fp16. So these really just need to be able to run a few MS AI apps. A quick googling tells me things like the Gen-AI in photoshop is actually done in the cloud, so that should still work but doesn't really require a special "AI PC".

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#78

The AI is the least interesting part of this announcement. Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality. That's possibly huge news.

The huge news is indeed that this time vendors support Microsoft's ARM efforts.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#79
post #16

Will this run locally, or is part of the work outsourced? With "Recall", can law enforcement ask your laptop "Has your user done anything suspicious lately"?

Even if it is run locally, does it sync between your devices?

Considering we seem to be putting safety largely out the window, I can see someone saying "yeah I want to be able to ask my other computer what I did on a different computer" or whatever. Thats valuable! Ignoring the risks that involves.

Also, even if it is run locally that likely means that some sort of additional logging (possibly screenshots given the mention of "photographic memory") on top of what is already in the system logs to achieve this.

Windows 11 LTSC, which will hopefully have these features ripped out, can't come soon enough.

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