AMD and Intel are finally getting the Copilot+ treatment

By Jacob Roach Published September 3, 2024

The Asus Zenbook S 16 sitting on a coffee table. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Microsoft confirmed at IFA 2024 that its slate of Copilot+ features are coming to AMD and Intel laptops later this year. In a blog post, Microsoft revealed that AMD and Intel PCs that meet the minimum Copilot+ requirements will receive the AI features in November through free Windows 11 updates.

The inclusion of AMD and Intel has been up in the air since Microsoft released Copilot+ laptops exclusively with Qualcomm CPUs earlier this year. Although AMD and Intel held strong that the AI features would be available on Ryzen AI 300 and Lunar Lake CPUs, respectively, neither company would provide a definitive time frame.

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Microsoft’s announcement comes just moments after Intel fully detailed its Lunar Lake laptop CPUs, which will go on sale later in September. AMD has already released its Ryzen AI 300 chips in laptops like the Asus Zenbook S 16 OLED. Both ranges meet Microsoft’s minimum requirements for Copilot+, which calls for a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with at least 45 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of power.

All laptops that meet the requirements will get a handful of features come November. Those include Live Captions with translation, image generation in Microsoft Paint, and AI adjustments in the Photos app. Laptops will also have access to Windows Studio Effects in video calls, which are available on current and last-gen laptops already.

One feature that might not arrive is Recall. This controversial feature was pulled from Copilot+. It tracks everything you do on your PC to provide context-aware responses, and so far, no one has been able to use Recall outside of press. Microsoft has confirmed that Recall will launch in October for Windows Insiders, possibly setting the stage for a wider rollout in November when AMD and Intel laptops get Copilot+ certification.

Both AMD and Intel are ready for Copilot+ with their latest CPUs, and they claim a performance advantage over Qualcomm when it comes to AI tasks. Intel says that its Lunar Lake NPU is capable of 50 TOPS, while AMD says its Ryzen AI 300 CPUs have the fastest NPU on the market. We’ll see how the ranges can handle Copilot+ tasks when the feature set becomes available later this year.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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Microsoft finally adds missing Copilot+ AI tools to Intel and AMD PCs

Copilot+ PCs being announced from the stage.

If you bought into the promise of a new AI-charged Copilot+ PC with the latest-gen Intel or AMD processor, and found a few tricks missing, the long wait is over. A handful of those Copilot+ features are finally expanding beyond machines with a Snapdragon X series processor inside.

It’s roughly been a year since Microsoft introduced the Copilot+ PC label, a new breed of computing machines that put AI performance at the forefront. For months, Qualcomm was the sole silicon supplier for such machines.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot gets an AI Researcher that everyone will love

Researcher agent in action inside Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

Microsoft is late to the party, but it is finally bringing a deep research tool of its own to the Microsoft 365 Copilot platform across the web, mobile, and desktop. Unlike competitors such as Google Gemini, Perplexity, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, all of which use the Deep Research name, Microsoft is going with the Researcher agent branding.
The overarching idea, however, isn’t too different. You tell the Copilot AI to come up with thoroughly researched material on a certain topic or create an action plan, and it will oblige by producing a detailed document that would otherwise take hours of human research and compilation. It’s all about performing complex, multi-step research on your behalf as an autonomous AI agent.
Just to avoid any confusion early on, Microsoft 365 Copilot is essentially the rebranded version of the erstwhile Microsoft 365 (Office) app. It is different from the standalone Copilot app, which is more like a general purpose AI chatbot application.
Researcher: A reasoning agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
How Researcher agent works?
Underneath the Researcher agent, however, is OpenAI’s Deep Research model. But this is not a simple rip-off. Instead, the feature’s implementation in Microsoft 365 Copilot runs far deeper than the competition. That’s primarily because it can look at your own material, or a business’ internal data, as well.
Instead of pulling information solely from the internet, the Researcher agent can also take a look at internal documents such as emails, chats, internal meeting logs, calendars, transcripts, and shared documents. It can also reference data from external sources such as Salesforce, as well as other custom agents that are in use at a company.
“Researcher’s intelligence to reason and connect the dots leads to magical moments,” claims Microsoft. Researcher agent can be configured by users to reference data from the web, local files, meeting recordings, emails, chats, and sales agent, on an individual basis — all of them, or just a select few.

Why it stands out?

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Microsoft will soon use AI to help you find your photos and files on Copilot+ PCs

The Surface Laptop shown in front of a Copilot+ sign.

In a Windows Insider blog post, Microsoft announced an AI upgrade to Windows Search to make finding photos, documents, and settings easier. However, the enhanced feature is restricted to Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon processors; AMD and Intel support is coming soon.

The update has all the same fixes and improvements from build 26100.3613; nonetheless, some of the best Copilot+ PCs will be left out simply because they use AMD or Intel processors. Microsoft will release the update gradually, and you can also take advantage of both semantic and lexical indexing to search for your photos and documents more efficiently. Because of this improvement, you don't have to remember the exact file name you're looking for, which is a huge time-saver.