Products You May Like
A new raft of Microsoft hardware is on the way, but the company’s upcoming event may focus more on what that hardware can do in the age of generative AI. The company’s announcement of the March 21 event promises a “new era of work with Copilot,” the Microsoft-specific implementation of OpenAI’s GPT large language model. Alongside improvements to Copilot, we also expect to see some new Surface PCs with powerful on-device AI hardware.
Microsoft has expanded access to Copilot in recent months—if you’re running Windows 11, you almost certainly have a Copilot icon on your taskbar now. Copilot reaches out to Microsoft servers to do all the heavy AI lifting, but that might change with the new Surface devices, which are expected to have 14th Gen Intel Core Ultra and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips. These processor families include powerful neural processing units (NPUs), which could expand Copilot’s capabilities.
According to Windows Central, Microsoft will announce two pieces of hardware at the event: the Surface Laptop 6 and the Surface Pro 10. Microsoft’s Surface Pro line has offered several Arm variants in the past, but reports suggest that the Surface Laptop 6 could be the first in the line to have an Arm variant. However, we might not hear much about the Arm PCs at the March 21 event—Microsoft may wait until June to talk about its Arm hardware. That’s closer to when the devices will be available in early summer, but the x86 versions should be available in the weeks following the announcement.
Credit: Microsoft
We’ll likely hear about new Copilot features for all devices, but Microsoft’s push for AI PCs suggests there will be something special for devices with NPUs. This would probably take the form of a more limited local processing mode—you won’t get all the capabilities of Copilot in the cloud as you need powerful AI accelerators and tons of memory to run the full GPT models. However, a slimmed-down model that can work with local data or settings would be plausible. This could be part of the “AI Explorer” feature rumored for a future update, which would make your PC’s settings and apps accessible in a more general way using Copilot.
Microsoft’s event will begin at 9 a.m. PDT on March 21. In addition to the new AI features and hardware, we may also hear about the next major OS update, Windows 11 24H2, which could debut as soon as September.