Enlarge / Intel's Core Ultra chips are some of the first x86 PC processors to include built-in NPUs. Software support will slowly follow. (credit: Intel)

When it announced the new Copilot key for PC keyboards last month, Microsoft declared 2024 "the year of the AI PC." On one level, this is just an aspirational PR-friendly proclamation, meant to show investors that Microsoft intends to keep pushing the AI hype cycle that has put it in competition with Apple for the title of most valuable publicly traded company .

But on a technical level, it is true that PCs made and sold in 2024 and beyond will generally include AI and machine-learning processing capabilities that older PCs don't. The main thing is the neural processing unit (NPU), a specialized block on recent high-end Intel and AMD CPUs that can accelerate some kinds of generative AI and machine-learning workloads more quickly (or while using less power) than the CPU or GPU could.

Qualcomm's Windows PCs were some of the first to include an NPU, since the Arm processors used in most smartphones have included some kind of machine-learning acceleration for a few years now (Apple's M-series chips for Macs all have them, too, going all the way back to 2020's M1). But the Arm version of Windows is a insignificantly tiny sliver of the entire PC market; x86 PCs with Intel's Core Ultra chips, AMD's Ryzen 7040/8040-series laptop CPUs, or the Ryzen 8000G desktop CPUs will be many mainstream PC users' first exposure to this kind of hardware.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s efforts to put new AI-powered features into Windows 11 will pick up steam this fall when Windows Copilot is officially released, but the company isn’t stopping there. According to a report from Windows Central , Microsoft is in the early stages of experimenting with new features for built-in Windows apps like Photos, Snipping Tool, and even Paint, which all fall under the broad heading of “AI.”

The report claims that Photos, Camera, and Snipping Tool—all apps that work with either photos or screenshots—could soon include optical character recognition (OCR) features that would allow users to copy and paste text from images into word processors and text editors. The Photos app could also gain the ability to recognize people and objects in photos and make it easier to separate them from their backgrounds.

The venerable MS Paint app , on the other hand, could gain some generative AI functions that would allow it to create images based on text prompts, similar to features currently supported by more high-end image editors like Adobe Photoshop . Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator already uses a DALL-E-based model to create AI-generated images.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Exactly two years after Apple first announced the M1, its direct successor has finally been revealed. Apple executives and product managers presented details about the new chip—predictably dubbed the M2—during its annual developer conference.

The M2 is an improvement in many ways on the M1, but it's not meant to one-up the higher-end M1 Pro, M1 Max, or M1 Ultra seen in the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio. M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants have higher CPU and GPU core counts that will still outspeed the M2's performance improvements.

Like its predecessor, the M2 has eight CPU cores—four high-performance cores and four low-power efficiency cores. Apple says it will perform about 18 percent faster than the M1's CPU  It also bumps the GPU cores from eight to 10, providing a 35 percent performance boost, though as with M1 we may see multiple versions of the M2 chip that ship with different numbers of GPU cores.