Or at least a number of ‘key capabilities’ of Copilot will be processed locally on your laptop
Microsoft’s Copilot will be able to run locally on your AI PC in the future, it has been confirmed, as have the hardware requirements in terms of how powerful an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) will be required in these AI-focused devices.
Tom’s Hardware reports that at Team Blue’s AI Summit in Taipei, in a Q&A session, Todd Lewellen, VP of Intel’s Client Computing Group, confirmed to our sister site that the NPU of a next-gen AI PC will need to reach 40 TOPS (a measurement of processing power in relation to AI tasks).
Note that this is the NPU of the next generation of AI PCs – an army of devices on the horizon, apparently – not the current-gen devices which operate with much lower TOPS than that (we’ll come back to that momentarily).
As mentioned, it was further confirmed that in the future Microsoft’s Copilot AI will be able to run locally on the AI PC – which this additional NPU processing power will facilitate, as opposed to needing to be online and tap the power of the cloud for the AI assistant’s responses. Or at least some, or perhaps a great deal, of Copilot functionality will be handled locally.
