Why Windows 11’s new flagship feature won’t be available to everyone

Microsoft’s new AI Explorer feature will be announced next month, and it looks like it will only be available to PC owners with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip. For now.

It will be almost exactly a month before Microsoft announces its major plans for the rest of 2024 during the Microsoft Build conference, including PC AI, a new Surface line, and a major Windows 11 update.

At the same time, manufacturers and OEMs are working behind the scenes to prepare the next generation of smart PCs with their even smarter next-generation chips. This obviously includes Qualcomm with its long-awaited Snapdragon X Elite, as well as Intel and AMD, which are preparing new processors by the end of the year.

However, it appears that Qualcomm has an advantage in the area of ​​artificial intelligence, while one of the flagship features of Windows 11 24H2 will initially be reserved only for the ARM chip.

AI Explorer exclusive to ARM devices

The information was released by journalist Zach Bowden from the Windows Central website, who quotes the main spy here. @Albacore on Twitter (X)who was able to find out the system requirements for the AI ​​Explorer feature of the next version of Windows 11.

As a reminder, it allows you to explore everything you’ve done on your computer using natural language queries, be it documents opened or deleted, text typed in any application, websites visited and images viewed.

AI Explorer will clearly be at the center of the experience Microsoft wants for AI-powered PCs, but it will apparently only be intended for machines that integrate Qualcomm’s ARM64 Snapdragon X chip. There is no mention of x86 architecture, so Intel and AMD processors will not be compatible. Begin with.

Intel and AMD are lagging behind… for now

Thus, this confirms the figure of 45 TOPS (trillion or tera operations per second) as the minimum required by Microsoft for the NPU (neural processing units) of these laptops labeled “PC AI”.

We recently mentioned Intel’s announcements regarding the upcoming generation of Lunar Lake mobile processors. The manufacturer’s big promise for this chip, expected at the end of the year, is NPU integration reaching only 45 TOPS for all AI-related operations. The same figure was cited by Qualcomm for its Snapdragon X Elite, as well as AMD for the Strix Point generation, which will appear in early 2025.

You can bet that this exclusivity will initially be temporary for ARM PCs, and by early 2025 it will be compatible with future Intel and AMD platforms. Qualcomm confirms its slight advantage over competitors, while the manufacturer can be assumed to already be developing the next version. .