Starting in November, Microsoft’s Copilot+ features will also be available on compatible x86 laptops. Until now, these under the hood features were reserved for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite devices.

Intel is bringing its Copilot+ functionality to x86 laptops. Copilot+ PCs launched this summer exclusively with ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors. These chips were the only ones that met Microsoft’s minimum requirements to carry the label.

Above all, Microsoft wants to ensure that Copilot+ laptops have sufficient NPU processing power on board. Although Intel’s marketing department stubbornly claimed otherwise, Intel did not yet have an AI-compatible chip on the market and AMD’s first NPUs were not powerful enough either.

The situation has now changed. AMD has proposed more powerful chips and Intel recently announced Lunar Lake. This means that suitable processors are also available in the x86 camp. To take this reality into account, Microsoft is releasing an update for compatible x86 systems in November. From then on, they will support the same Copilot+ functionality as their ARM-based competitors.

Mediocre features

At this point, don’t expect much. You can play with AI in Paint, although this feature works much less well than, say, Dall-E in the cloud. You can also generate live captions for whatever is playing on your screen, as long as the language is English. And then there are some AI-powered features like automatic eye contact during a call, which never worked well in our tests, or more efficient background blur. The latter feature is the most interesting, as it makes Microsoft Teams run much more efficiently.

Microsoft plans to add AI functionality. For example, there is indexing of the contents of multimedia files so that you can search for them, and we can expect a version of Recall sooner or later.