Intel needs a little more time to reach (or maybe even surpass) the projected performance of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips, so no fresh Intel Surfaces for now.
I found something amiss in Microsoft’s huge reveal of its new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models: Where are the ones with Intel processors inside? Yes, for the first time, Microsoft has released consumer-grade Surface products without an Intel option—just Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite.
Without jumping to any conclusions as to the fate of Intel, or what this means writ large for the computing industry, it’s clear to me why Intel has been left out of the mainstream Surface lineup, as well as Microsoft’s initial Copilot+ PC launch—at least for now. (It’s still Intel Inside the «Surface for Business» models released earlier this year.)Qualcomm Beat Intel to the Copilot+ PC Punch
While Microsoft is clearly in partnership with all the major Windows PC chip manufacturers in its new “Copilot+ PC” program, you’ll find only Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips inside the first Copilot+ PCs that drop starting June 18. I suspect this has to do with Qualcomm’s current claim to 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with its Snapdragon X chips, led by the Snapdragon X’s Hexagon neural processing units (NPU).
Comparatively, laptops available now with Intel’s first-generation “Meteor Lake” Core Ultra chips produce up to 34 TOPS, which is not only a smaller number but also not capable of processing locally the stresses laid on by Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, which is the namesake of Copilot+ PCs. (At least 40 TOPS on the NPU are required for a system to handle local Copilot queries.)
By this point, it seems that Microsoft had a target date to launch its Copilot+ PC program, and Intel wasn’t able to meet it with “Lunar Lake,” its next generation of Core Ultra processors. The NPUs in Lunar Lake, Intel teased on May 20, should push 45 TOPS alone, with more than double that potential when the integrated graphics processor (IGP) cores are applied.
