Microsoft CEO Satya Narayana Nadella speaks at a Microsoft Live event in Manhattan, New York City, October 26, 2016.
lucas jackson reuter
microsoft’s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, featuring OpenAI and Google.
One area where Microsoft has a clear advantage over others in the AI race is its ownership of Windows, which gives it a huge PC user base.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 will be the year that AI becomes “the most premium part of every PC.”
The company already offers a paid chatbot assistant, Copilot, in its Bing search engine and Office productivity software. In the future, PC users will be able to learn more about how AI is built into Windows and what they can do with it on the new AI PC.
Build comes just days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model to date and showed how Gemini AI works on computers and mobile phones. Ahead of Google’s event, OpenAI announced a new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is his lead investor in OpenAI, and the company’s Copilot technology is based on OpenAI’s model.
For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold. The goal is to maintain its preeminent position in the AI space and strengthen PC sales, which have been sluggish for the past two years due to the pandemic-induced upgrade cycle.
In a recent memo, Dell Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring told investors that the PC market continues to recover, given customer comments and recent upward revisions to notebook Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) products. “I’m bullish on this,” he wrote.
Technology industry researcher Gartner estimates that PC shipments rose 0.9% in the quarter after years of weakness. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s quarterly earnings call last month that PC demand was “slightly better than expected.”
Microsoft’s new AI tools could give businesses and consumer customers another reason to upgrade their older computers. HPDell or Lenovo.
“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization, it does increase Windows usage, Windows retention, and customer migration to higher priced and more powerful PCs (thus increasing Microsoft’s revenue per device. ), and likely drive search revenue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft announced its earnings. .
Microsoft, which will provide software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, will have the following chips in its computers: AMD, intel and Qualcomm For offline AI jobs. This includes, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize your transcription without being connected.
What is an AI computer?
An important hardware addition to the AI PC is the so-called neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are specifically designed to handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally, it has been used by companies such as: apple You can improve your photos and videos, or use it for voice recognition.
Microsoft has not yet said what the AI PC will be able to do without an internet connection. But Google’s Pixel 8 Pro phones don’t have a full computer processor and can use Gemini Nano AI to summarize and transcribe recordings and recommend text message responses. can.
Computers powered by Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips with dedicated NPUs are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon
intel To tell The chip enables things like “real-time language translation, automated reasoning, and enhanced gaming environments.”
Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them with its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to be released in the next series of Macs later this year.
window on arm
QualcommUnlike intel and AMDWe provide chips equipped with armBase architecture. One of Microsoft’s sessions will talk about “Next Generation Windows on Arm,” and will cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how it differs from Intel and AMD versions of Windows. .
According to a recent study, Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD with 13%. Data from Canalys.
Qualcomm has previously promoted its Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting benefits such as longer battery life, thinner designs, and cellular connectivity. But previous versions of Qualcomm’s chips were limited in what they could offer consumers. For example, in 2018, the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip was unable to run most Windows applications.
Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle legacy apps on Arm, but questions remain.The company has FAQ page For computers running on ARM hardware only.
AI elsewhere
Microsoft will also host sessions like “AI Everywhere,” which will cover how to “accelerate generative AI models” on devices running in the cloud.
In the Azure AI Studio session, developers explore how to create their own Copilot chatbots. This could be similar to what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. For example, imagine a company building a chatbot that helps employees choose health insurance.
