Developments in the field of artificial intelligence accelerated with the COMPUTEX event. NVIDIA and AMD are preparing to launch gaming laptops that include Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot Plus features announced for laptops with Qualcomm processors.

NVIDIA and AMD bring Microsoft’s Copilot Plus feature!

At the COMPUTEX event, NVIDIA announced that RTX AI PC laptops, which will be released by Asus and MSI and include Copilot Plus PC features, are on the way. So what advantages will these computers have?

In a blog post, NVIDIA stated, “The newly announced ASUS and MSI RTX AI PC laptops feature GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and Windows 11 AI PC features, with power-saving system-on-chips.” It also confirmed that these laptops will come with AMD’s latest Strix CPUs.

At Computex 2024, under AMD’s leadership, a new chip architecture strategy for AI data centers and AI PCs was introduced. Here’s AMD’s roadmap.

However, NVIDIA noted that the first Copilot Plus PCs with AMD processors may not contain Microsoft’s AI features when they are released. Additionally, it was stated that Windows 11 AI PCs will receive a free update to Copilot+ PC experiences when they are available.

This suggests that Microsoft may not be ready to launch Recall and other AI-powered Windows features on AMD chips or that they may be exclusive for a while to Windows on ARM Qualcomm-processed hardware to be launched on June 18.

NVIDIA is also in a kind of race for AI-powered tasks in laptops. While Microsoft continues to move AI models to NPUs, NVIDIA is working to make its GPUs useful in this AI battlefield on PCs. With the slogan RTX AI laptops, it emphasized that its GPUs have the capacity to handle heavier AI workloads than an NPU.

In fact, in June, it is launching an RTX AI Toolkit, which includes tools and SDKs for model customization, optimization, and deployment. These tools will optimize something like Meta’s Llama 2 model to work with much less VRAM and higher performance.

Additionally, NVIDIA is collaborating with Microsoft on core AI models integrated into Windows 11. “Our collaboration will provide application developers with easy API access to GPU-accelerated small language models (SLMs) on-device enabled by Windows Copilot Runtime,” it said.

Microsoft announced Windows Copilot Runtime last month at Build, and NVIDIA said its work to accelerate AI models using RTX GPUs will be released later this year as a developer preview.

Microsoft’s Windows Copilot Runtime is designed to make it easier for developers to add AI-powered features to their applications. All of this relies on NPU hardware and NVIDIA’s GPUs to accelerate these features.

Currently, since NPUs operate at around 40 TOPS and NVIDIA’s PC GPUs can handle more than 1000 TOPS for AI, there are some significant performance differences for developers to consider here.

NPUs are designed for smaller models and high power efficiency in laptops. However, GPUs can do a good job of handling larger models with higher performance where battery life is not a critical factor, such as in PC desktops.