Microsoft shock! Windows 11 Recall feature worked on an old device

Microsoft introduced its new Copilot Plus PCs last week. These new PCs were designed by the company to offer exclusive AI features in Windows 11. However, one of the new Windows 11 features, Recall, has already been run on an old ARM-based device with unsupported hardware. So how was this possible when PCs with this feature haven’t been released yet? Here are the details…

New Windows 11 Recall feature worked on an unsupported old ARM-based device

Recall is a feature in the new Copilot Plus PCs that uses local AI models to record everything on your computer in the background. With this feature, you can view a timeline of everything you have done or seen on your computer. This allows you to search for anything, such as photos, documents, and conversations.

Microsoft had stated that the Recall feature requires the latest neural processing units (NPU), but Windows enthusiasts found a way to run this feature on older ARM-based hardware. How? Windows expert Albacore developed a tool called Amperage. This new tool runs the Recall feature on devices with older Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, Microsoft’s SQ processors, or Ampere chipsets.

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Additionally, this tool enables Recall on these ARM-based devices with the latest 24H2 update of Windows 11 installed. Currently, it only works on older ARM hardware and will soon be available with AMD and Intel’s Copilot Plus PCs.

Microsoft has currently released AI components only for the Windows on ARM platform. Therefore, the necessary x64 AI components for Intel and AMD hardware are not yet available. However, with the announcement of AMD and Intel’s Copilot Plus PCs, this suggests that Microsoft’s AI components could also be released for these devices.

This raises the question: If these AI features can be run on older hardware, why is Microsoft limiting these features to new devices? Microsoft might argue that NPUs with 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) capacity provide a foundation for future AI experiences.

However, running Recall on older ARM hardware has questioned how necessary these limitations are. You can access the Amperage application running Recall from here. What do you think? You can share your thoughts in the comments section below.