Microsoft: A more intelligent version of Windows is on the horizon thanks to NPUs

Microsoft has been pushing the concept of Copilot+ PCs for the past year or so. It defines these machines as those that contain AI chips, or Neural Processing Units (NPUs), capable of running AI tasks locally at high speeds. An NPU is capable of running 40 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS), and now, Microsoft has explained that this particular piece of hardware is paving the way to a more "intelligent" Windows.

Microsoft has highlighted that the architecture of an NPU is designed to process machine learning calculations at a far higher speed than a general-purpose CPU or GPU, while consuming less battery. This has enabled the company to offer "sophisticated" AI experiences (like Recall?) on hardware that costs a few hundred dollars rather than dedicated expensive hardware. This is why Microsoft believes that NPUs will be critical when more advanced AI capabilities become available.

Although NPUs are capable of running smaller models locally, they can also work with cloud-powered services to run larger models that offer even better features. Microsoft has credited the development of Copilot+ PCs with NPUs to the Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera, which performed AI tasks locally very efficiently. The company then shared its learnings with hardware partners like AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel, which then developed AI chips for PCs.

Steven Bathiche, Microsoft's corporate vice president and technical fellow who established the Applied Sciences team responsible for developing AI features in Windows, noted that:

AI features available on Windows create novel experiences, and we developed the hardware needed to support those experiences. [...] If you think about it, for the past 60 years, how we used a computer really hasn’t changed. [...] Agents are really the north star. They’re now the new unit of interaction for people and of programming for developers.

Since Windows is powering agentic experiences through cloud services and NPUs, it emphasizes that the future is ripe for an OS that requires less clicking. A prominent example of this is the dedicated agent available in Settings, but Microsoft has teased even more complex tasks being automated in the future.

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Posted Friday 3 October 2025 at 5:12 pm AEST (my time).

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