Microsoft held a Surface and AI event ahead of its 2024 Build conference in Seattle, Washington, where the company finally revealed new Surface Laptops and a Surface Pro.
The anticipated new devices sport Qualcomm’s much-hyped Snapdragon X Elite chip as well as the slightly less powerful X Plus chip.
Microsoft also announced ‘Copilot + PC,’ new branding to highlight AI-capable PCs. Microsoft said this new category of PCs are totally revamped, offering super thin designs while still being the “most powerful PCs in the world.” The performance relies on a new architecture that combines CPU, GPU and Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which can achieve over 40 trillion operations per second.
The Surface Laptop comes in two sizes like before, with 13.8- and 15-inch display options. Microsoft also revamped the laptop’s design, making it more modern, slimming the bezels and adding an AI-enhanced camera and haptic touchpad.
As for the Surface Pro, it has a new OLED with HDR display option, ultrawide camera, and a new Surface Pro Flex keyboard. The Flex Keyboard can be used connected or disconnected to the Surface Pro, allowing for more flexible input options.
The company said its new Surface Laptop is up to 80 percent faster than its predecessors while also boasting the longest battery life on any Surface PC. It’s also more efficient, achieving the same peak performance while draining half as much battery. Microsoft says the new Surfaces double the battery life of previous Surfaces.
Microsoft also did a live Photoshop demo comparing a new Surface Laptop to a MacBook Air with M3 (the laptops otherwise feature the same specs) that showed the Surface Laptop processing images nearly two times faster than the MacBook. Adobe’s apps are also coming to Copilot + PCs available today or coming soon. The company also said it partnered with Blackmagic to offload some DaVinci Resolve features onto the NPU to help boost performance.
Microsoft says its Surface Pro 9 is up to 90 percent faster than its predecessors.
Both new Surface devices feature Wi-Fi 7.
The company said Copilot + PCs sport significant improvements thanks to a huge leap in compute performance. Microsoft is working closely with Intel, AMD and Qualcomm to achieve higher performance. Microsoft claimed that Copilot + PCs running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip are significantly faster than Apple’s M3 chip, including up to 58 percent better sustained multithreaded performance. There’s also Prism, a new ARM translation layer for Windows.
Copilot improvements
Microsoft detailed some improvements coming to Copilot as well, such as turning it into a more app-like experience that can be resized and repositioned. Additionally, Windows users will be able to drag and drop between other apps and Copilot. OpenAI’s GPT-4o will also make its way into Copilot. Microsoft showed a demo of someone playing Minecraft while Copilot speaks to them and teaches them how to play the game.
Later, Microsoft detailed Copilot Vision to help gamers in-game by allowing them to ask questions. For example, while flying in Microsoft Flight Simulator, gamers could summon Copilot to ask where the nearest airport is so they can land their plane.
Another feature Microsoft highlighted was ‘Recall,’ which leverages AI and the improved system performance to help people find things they were doing on their PC. Recall will only be available on the Copilot + PC devices. Recall can help people find documents, websites, conversations and more, and can even work based on little details, such as mentioning that the document had purple writing.
Microsoft says Recall will stay on-device and the company won’t use any of the data for AI training. Recall leverages several small models that are built into Windows, allowing the AI to work efficiently in Windows and across all apps. Microsoft said Recall builds a “semantic index” with context-based information to power Recall. There’s also Windows Copilot Runtime, which is a new layer of Windows 11 comprised of over 40 AI models.
The company teased other AI features like Live Captions, the ability for Copilot to draw and sketch with users and more. The Photos app will also gain the ability to restore old photos with AI-powered super resolution and other capabilities.
Another demo Microsoft showed on stage was Cocreator running on the new Surface Pro. Cocreator allows people to put in a prompt and also sketch while AI model pull from the sketch and text prompt to generate a picture. Users can adjust how much input the AI models have on the final result. Because Cocreator leverages the NPU and runs locally, it’s much faster and doesn’t require tokens or a premium subscription.
More to come…
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