Microsoft's certification category for Windows PCs with NPUs delivering 40+ TOPS, enabling on-device AI features like Copilot and Recall.
Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, the first machine on Nvidia's RTX Spark Arm chip, starts at $2,599.99 and reaches $5,899.99 with 128GB of memory. Microsoft built it for developers running AI models locally, and so far its case against the MacBook Pro rests on the company's own performance claims.
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Lenovo's ThinkPad L14 Gen 7 puts Intel's Panther Lake chips inside the same 1.36kg chassis as the Gen 6, with on-device AI as its main addition. ITPro rates the build and battery well but says the AI still needs work, so the AI alone makes a weak case for an early refresh.
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Microsoft is shipping its new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop without the Copilot+ PC name, though their 80 TOPS NPUs double the label's 40 TOPS requirement. Buyers who shopped by the badge now have to check NPU, memory and storage specs themselves.
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Microsoft has stopped calling new PCs Copilot+ even when they clear the old bar of a 40 TOPS NPU and 16GB of RAM, Surface CVP Brett Ostrum said. Buying specs that used the name as shorthand for that hardware now have to state the NPU and memory figures themselves.
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A reverse engineer says Cocreator embeds a 16-byte GUID handed out by a Microsoft moderation endpoint into images the NPU generates locally. Local inference and private inference are not the same purchase.
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The convergence plan dates to 2009, and ZDNET expects the first machines in September. What Google has not published is where Gemini's screen context goes, or what it costs.
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