The challenges of supporting Copilot+ PCs in the enterprise

[Pelican Press 0]

The challenges of supporting Copilot+ PCs in the enterprise

Earlier in May,

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announced the Copilot+ PC, a new category of Windows PC designed for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Yusuf Mehdi, consumer chief marketing officer at

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, claimed the devices, based on Qualcomm silicon, are

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(trillion operations per second), have all-day battery life and would provide access to the most advanced AI models.

While

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has dallied in Arm-based hardware for several years, and offers the Windows RT x86 emulator for Arm-based PCs, such devices have remained a niche. This latest attempt is seen by some industry observers as a way to bolster the PC market and emulate Apple’s success when it switched from Intel-based hardware to its own silicon, based on the Arm architecture.

Geoff Blaber, CEO at CCS Insight, said: “

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has identified an opportunity to re-energise the PC market, transform the user experience and has galvanised the PC ecosystem to support its vision. If the market needs evidence of

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’s determination and drive under Satya Nadella or its commitment to lead in generative AI, Copilot+ is a further proof point.”

Blaber points out that the Copilot+ specification established by

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means all the initial hardware being launched is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series chipset. “This is a huge coup for Qualcomm, an endorsement of the power and performance it has delivered with Snapdragon X Series and gives it a huge opportunity to finally break into an Intel and AMD dominated PC market,” he added.

Blaber believes

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hopes that it can close the performance gap with

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via Qualcomm silicon.

“The performance of Apple’s M-series silicon established a significant competitive threat to Windows PCs and succeeded in taking customers in part due to battery life and performance credentials,” said Blaber. “It was essential that

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responded, and this launch is the result of years of work to align silicon, software, hardware roadmaps and partners.”

Questions are being raised over the difference between the Copilot+ PCs, which use Qualcomm silicon, and AI PCs, which are largely being positioned as the next generation of

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) -powered PC hardware.

PC maker Dell is among a number of leading PC manufacturers that have launched Copilot+ PCs. Louise Quennell, senior director CSG (client solutions group) at Dell Technologies ***, said: “We are committed to silicon diversity; we know that choice is best for our customers, so we will continue to invest in offering the broadest AI PC portfolio across the silicon ecosystem.

“We’re working very closely with

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and Qualcomm to bring the same degree of rigour as the rest of our x86 portfolio in terms of software compatibility and feature availability.”

Among the biggest

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will face is that software will need to run natively, rather than emulated, to achieve the best performance and battery life from Copilot+ devices.

Quennell said that Dell is also porting all its own software, such as Dell Optimizer and Dell Command Update, to get the benefits that the Arm-based architecture delivers. However, she noted that commercial customers are accustomed to the x86 architecture: “Making that change can result in a significant shift for IT departments.”

Acer is also one of the launch partners for Copilot+ PCs. The company urged IT departments to test compatibility before deploying such devices in the enterprise. Acer said: “IT departments should conduct compatibility testing to ensure that all necessary software and applications used by the organisation are compatible with Windows 11 and the AI features of Copilot+ PCs.”

In its documentation for Windows on Arm,

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said that Windows 11 adds the ability to run unmodified x64 Windows apps on Arm devices. “This ability to run x86 & x64 apps on Arm devices gives end-users confidence that the majority of their existing apps and tools will run well even on new Arm-powered devices.”

During its annual Build 2024 developer conference,

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discussed an update to its emulator called Prism. The company describes Prism as a new emulation engine that it claims more efficiently generates code-making emulated apps run faster on all Windows on Arm devices. According to

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, Prism translates x86/x64 executable code to Arm64 and works in the background when an x64 app is opened on a Windows on Arm device.

However, for the best performance, responsiveness and battery life,

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urged developers to build or port Arm-native Windows apps.

Emulation is regarded by many as a stop-gap to help IT decision-makers move onto the new hardware platform without requiring them to upgrade and rewrite all their software for the ARM processor.

In a post on

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noted that while the transition to Arm in the Windows ecosystem holds promise, it comes with challenges: “Legacy applications designed for x86 architecture might face compatibility issues, requiring either emulation or adaptation. The shift demands a concerted effort from developers to create or port Arm-native Windows applications for optimal performance.”

However, while there appears to be a lot of momentum around the Qualcomm silicon,

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plans to certify AMD and Intel-based hardware going forward. This is likely to result in a more complex end user computing environment where Windows PCs may be running native 64-bit and 32-bit AMD/Intel PC Copilot+  Windows applications, native ARM64 Copilot+ Windows applications and Windows applications that need to be emulated on Qualcomm AMD64 silicon. 

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#challenges #supporting #Copilot #PCs #enterprise

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