All major manufacturers are little by little sending processors for AI applications to the notebook race. We tested all the devices with the latest features.
The year 2024 for notebooks has seen many advances, including hasty ones. At the beginning of the year, Intel introduced Meteor Lake, the company’s first notebook CPU assembled from chiplets, and with it the new naming scheme Core Ultra (instead of Core i). However, the AI unit (Neural Processing Unit, NPU), which was touted at the time as a major innovation and integrated into the processor, was effectively phased out in May 2024. That was when Qualcomm’s ARM chip Snapdragon X Elite appeared on the market. For the foundation of Windows 11’s new AI capabilities, Microsoft has chosen a more powerful NPU, which the Copilot+ logo represents.
However, little is yet known about what Microsoft is promoting as Copilot+. More on Recall & Co. below. Even so, Snapdragon uses ARM rather than the x86 instruction set, so not all applications and peripherals can run on it, but the notebook’s battery life is Apple-level and significantly longer than what’s been possible recently with AMD or Intel CPUs. We covered this in detail over the summer.Eleven notebooks
