Microsoft introduced its new line of artificial intelligence (AI) PCs last month, announcing Copilot+ Windows laptops packing new silicon, that can match up to, and even surpass, the performance of a MacBook running on Apple’s in-house M series chips. The new thin and light Copilot+ laptops, from both Microsoft and its OEM partners Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, promise all-day battery life, AI features like Recall, Live Captions, Co-creator and more.

A host of these Copilot+ laptops are powered by Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite platform, announced at the Snapdragon Summit in October 2023. The American chipmaker, a major player in the smartphone SoC market, now hopes to take on chip giants Intel and AMD, and Apple’s in-house silicon, to make its mark in the PC segment. Microsoft is reportedly confident that the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Windows laptop can finally beat Apple’s MacBook models. In fact, as per internal testing from Qualcomm, the X Elite is said to be 28 percent faster than Apple’s M3 chipset.

At the eve of Computex Taipei last week, Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon took the stage and highlighted the capabilities of the new line of Copilot+ PCs. “The PC is reborn,” Amon said in his keynote, calling X Elite-powered Copilot+ PCs “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.” At Computex, the new laptops running on Qualcomm silicon were on display, showcasing AI features like Live Captions and Recall. Gadgets 360 got a chance to interact with X Elite-powered Microsoft Surface laptops at a Qualcomm demo room and try out some of the features first-hand.

Microsoft Surface Copilot+ laptops at Qualcomm’s demo room at Computex Taipei

At the sidelines of the tech trade show in Taipei, we also caught up with Nitin Kumar, vice-president of product management for Snapdragon chipsets at Qualcomm. In our chat, we covered a lot of ground — from the company’s partnership with Microsoft, to new Copilot+ features on the X Elite chip. We also touched upon the expectations from the new platform in terms of gaming performance and the path ahead for AI-powered laptops. Here are slightly edited and condensed excerpts from our chat:

Gadgets 360: Can you talk about the journey that has led to the X Elite chip launch and Qualcomm coming back into the PC game to position itself against traditional heavyweights like Intel and AMD, making it more of a three-horse race?

Nitin Kumar: Absolutely. I’ll actually take a step back and walk you through how we have envisioned this, why we are in this business and what we are trying to achieve. Of course, Qualcomm has a long history and legacy in smartphones, and India is a very predominant market for us; Snapdragon is a very well-known brand name for India market for smartphones.

If you look at the last decade, Qualcomm, has invested predominantly in smartphones in multiple technologies. Every year with every generation, we have driven the technology forward, we’ve driven the experience forward. When you draw a parallel to that with the PC industry, to be very honest, it hasn’t seen any significant innovation. When you look at the same, let’s say, last ten years or beyond, be it in terms of improvement or user experience or feature set or even battery life for that matter, things haven’t improved significantly.

So, we have the technological know-how and we wanted to bring that level of innovation onto the PC industry to provide that disruption. So that when you innovate or when you do more tasks or whatever you want to do with your PC, you get that better capability. So, our journey has been from that vision, that we have our core strength in leading technology, absolutely leading battery life — that’s our DNA — and we want to leverage our core strength, our DNA onto the PC industry and along with partnering with Microsoft with full Windows experience natively available on Arm architecture-based Snapdragon processor — we’ve had two or three generations of product in the past — but this one is absolutely foundational, absolutely unique, absolutely disruptive with the level of technology that we have packed in the X series processors. We’re very proud of that. That’s what the journey has been and that’s our vision: to be disruptive in the marketplace where the PC industry hasn’t been.

Intel unveiled its Lunar Lake laptop chip at Computex Taipei

Gadgets 360: From the consumer perspective, it feels like, in the past year, the pace of innovation, especially on the chipset side, has been pretty quick. We’ve already seen multiple iterations of advanced AI capable chips coming out. If a consumer wants a laptop with AI-ready features and they look at options running on AMD chips, or Intel’s (upcoming) Lunar Lake chips, and now there’s one that are running on Snapdragon. How does the consumer decide what to get? PC consumers know that Intel and AMD have been in the PC market for long, and Snapdragon is now coming in (with X Elite). Reported benchmark numbers say that it’s as powerful or more powerful than the M3 chip from Apple. But how do you make the consumer make that switch in their heads?

Nitin Kumar: Great question. And we think about that a lot, and I completely understand the crowded aspect of the messaging and the crowded aspect of the marketplace. Let me first give you a few data points on how we are looking at it and what we are doing as well. You’re correct, our competition in the X86 world has had a significantly longer legacy in terms of PC space. So, we completely understand that, and they have a presence associated with that. But at the same time, if you look at what Snapdragon is known for, especially in India market — for premium Android experience, you want that mobile device experience, you want the best experience on an Android phone that you can get, you got to go Snapdragon.

So, there is a brand equity that we have with Snapdragon. And we are bringing that same brand promise, that we have worked hard over generations to create with our mobile phone, onto a PC, as well. So, when as a consumer you have the absolute leading-edge Android smartphone powered by Snapdragon 800 series, 8 Gen 2, 8 Gen 3 platform, what you get is premium experience, premium battery life. So, for the consumer, it should be a seamless transition to look at. ‘OK, I go with Snapdragon X Elite, I’m bound to get the premium experience and premium battery life.’ That gives us a big, big edge over there.

And even with everybody talking about AI capability, I think there needs to be a second-level filter on what that really means. And how do you decipher the two out. Not all NPUs are created equal, if you will. What truly matters? Of course, one is just peak performance: Okay, I have 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) NPU or 45 tops NPU. But what truly matters is to think of it from a metric, which is NPU performance per power consumption, or NPU performance per Watt. What all I can load up on my NPU and get that task done as quickly or burning the least amount of power.

That’s where the efficiency, the mobility aspect will come in, and that’s where the Snapdragon promise, which comes from the mobile space, will tie into PC and help us differentiate in the market. We are very confident in our approach, in the promise that we are delivering, and we have made our comparisons. We’re very confident that these devices will be the absolute best Windows 11 Copilot+ devices in the marketplace. And with the strength of our partners, ecosystem and partnership with Microsoft, I think we will disrupt the market.

The Snapdragon X Elite was announced at Snapdragon Summit in October last year

Gadgets 360: We’ve also heard from Qualcomm that 1,200 games have been tested on the X Elite chip, but performance numbers have not been made public yet. And I’m not going to get into that. But what can gamers expect from Qualcomm?

Nitin Kumar: Very good point. It’s definitely in our interest to set the right expectation in the marketplace on what these systems are capable of. In the initial phase, we have been focused predominantly on consumer and then commercial space. To be very honest, gaming as a category is not our initial focus and the initial set of devices (on Snapdragon silicon) are not going to compete with the gaming category of devices.

Having said that, there is a class of gamers that are casual gamers, not necessarily hard-core gamers. But when you look at casual gaming, the performance the system is driving, it’s actually meeting or beating any other integrated GPU class of product for a casual gaming experience that is available today. And more importantly, you are able to achieve that same level of graphics and gaming capability at half the power. So, think from a casual gamer perspective, this will drive a better experience, not from a performance perspective, but battery-life perspective, and overall, you get a better system.

Gadgets 360: We tried out some of the AI features on Snapdragon-powered Microsoft Surface Copilot+ laptops. Some of them weren’t as accurate when it came to localised prompts. But Live Captions worked well with Hindi. How do you plan to localise these AI features?

Nitin Kumar: Qualcomm has been integrating an AI engine on our mobile platforms for almost a decade now. So, the class of leading-edge processors that we’ve had for our smartphone lineup, they’ve all had an AI engine of some sorts, half a TOPS, one TOPS — doesn’t matter. But we have been innovating on AI for long. The PC industry has just started to talk about it. So, think of all the AI models, AI work, AI optimisation that we have worked on the mobile front, we’re bringing all that out onto our PC platform as well — all that has been optimised, localised, and regionalised for the different regions.

So live translation has a very popular use case on smartphone model. All those AI use cases have been optimised on Snapdragon architecture. The fundamental architecture on smartphone and PC is exactly the same, so you can take that model and run it on a PC, and it will have a phenomenal result because it’s already so finely, optimally tuned for Snapdragon architecture.

Now the question is, what do you do from a Qualcomm perspective to enable the developers to optimise these new models for the PC industry? The PCs may require a different set of models, different AI use cases, and how do you enable that? For the last 10 years, we’ve been working on this AI journey on smartphone that we’re bringing to PC, so we have a whole set of AI tool sets, AI SDKs, AI stack models that we’ve made available to all the developers. So, we give them all the documentation and tool sets, and you as a developer can take that tool set, start writing your code. The tool set will give you all the changes required to make the model fully optimised on Snapdragon architecture. We have built that over a long time.

On top of that, at Microsoft Build, about two weeks back, we launched something called AI Hub for compute. It takes the ability of a developer to write their AI application on Snapdragon to the next level and makes it super convenient for them. You log in to AI Hub for compute, and it has about 70 or 100 models that are already optimised — stable diffusion is one model, Llama 2 is another, Hugging Face models are already there, that are already optimised for Snapdragon architecture.

What you can also do is, if let’s say you are a developer and you want to optimise for Snapdragon PC, you can create your model, upload it onto that portal, and it will run that model on a physical Snapdragon X Elite PC, and give you back the results to tell you, ‘hey, this is how your runtime was, this is where the optimisations can be, this is how you can debug it’ — all remotely. You don’t even need to have a Snapdragon X Elite as a developer device available with you. You can do it all remotely. You can build your own app with it. It will help you deploy it as well. All of it is super seamless and the traction on that has been tremendous since we launched it.

So, some of the models may not be fully optimised, as you said, they may not be regionalised. But we expect a lot of the local community, local developers — we have a partnership going on with local Indian developers — to partner and enable those AI experiences as locally as they want for their respective markets.

AI was the dominant theme at Computex Taipei this year

Gadgets 360: AI features are still in the stage of infancy. We’ve seen features that are focused more on helping creatives with their work, providing them new tools. But when do you see some of these features evolving and helping people and communities who are more in need, like aiding people with disabilities or people with less access?

Nitin Kumar: The variety of applications that we’re seeing, to be honest, is actually quite wide, ranging on a broad spectrum. There are creative applications like Co-creator, that help you create images with the help of prompts. Then, there is Llama type models, or large language models, which can write essays. So that’s on the productive side. I’ll give you a few more examples. Djay Pro application can help DJs mix music. You play any song, and it can quickly take the vocals out or just take the drums out or take the bass out and isolated noises. That is an apt algorithm to run on the NPU in a very low latency form fashion, locally on the device.

Then think of it from a developer perspective: You’re a software developer, you can generate code on the fly locally. There are a variety of these applications. I truly believe this is the start of a new sort of revolution and a new class of applications, because the power of the platform is just immense.

Gadgets 360: We’ve seen how quick the pace of innovation for AI has been in the past one-and-a-half years. It feels like when OpenAI kicked open the door, everything else fell out, as well. Do you see this intense pace of innovation being sustained or will it slow down and reach a plateau soon? The PC market in the past decade, before AI, seemed to have flatlined.

Nitin Kumar: Because of the disruption that this technology brings, as with any new technology, I think the pace initially will be quite disruptive and at an inflection point. You can draw a parallel to when smartphones were just coming around, be it the Apple ecosystem or the Android ecosystem. And the App Store was coming out with just 10 apps, 1,000 apps, and then 10,000 apps and then millions. And then it just grew very rapidly from there. And a whole series of use cases emerged out of the device, that were just unimaginable. You can go back another decade and think of the Internet as that moment. It was very hard to say (at the time) how many websites will show up or what kind of use cases will show up, or how does this thing even evolve? It’s unimaginable at that point.

But you know that the essence of the technology has enough of a spark to drive that kind of a revolution. So, my personal belief is that AI is definitely there. And of course it’s very widespread — from a cloud AI perspective, server AI perspective; we’re focusing a lot more on the on-device perspective. When you look at it in totality, this will completely drive a new set of devices, experiences, innovation, apps. The usability aspect of it is just hard to imagine, but that spiral effect, at least for a few years — it might be longer, as well — will continue at a very, very rapid pace. And from a Snapdragon perspective, we’re very excited about where we’re headed.

A rare sight unfolded on November 10, as NASA launched rockets that created artificial clouds beneath auroras during a minor geomagnetic storm over northern Norway. The event took place near Andøya Space Center, a facility situated in an ideal location for studying geomagnetic activity due to its proximity to the Arctic Circle. Tour operator Ivar Sandland, who witnessed the spectacle, told Space.com about the unusual visual phenomena during his trip from Bodo to Tromso.

As per the report by the publication, Sandland, who runs Nordland Adventures, assumed it was a cloud at first glance. He later discovered through local news that the visible trails in the sky were part of NASA’s ongoing experiments.

VortEx Mission Studies Atmospheric Energy Flow

The event was part of NASA’s Vorticity Experiment (VortEx), which investigates energy dynamics in the turbopause, where the mesosphere and thermosphere meet at approximately 90 kilometres above Earth. The report further mentions that the rockets released trimethyl aluminium, a compound that reacts in the atmosphere to produce visible streaks. These artificial clouds are used to track gravity waves, aiding researchers in understanding their interactions at this altitude.

Sounding rockets, smaller suborbital vehicles designed for research purposes, were deployed for the experiment. The visual effects created by the chemical release offered scientists crucial data on energy transfer processes, while also captivating onlookers with an unusual display under the northern lights.

Ideal Location for Space Research

Andøya Space Center serves as a hub for launching rockets intended for atmospheric and geomagnetic research. Charged particles from the sun, guided by Earth’s magnetic field towards the poles, produce auroras by interacting with gases in the upper atmosphere. This makes northern Norway an optimal site for observing these interactions.

Such experiments offer insights into atmospheric science while fostering curiosity among local residents and visitors, highlighting the intersection of research and natural wonder.

Cyberpunk 2077 is getting the last major update before developer CD Projekt Red moves on to the next project. Dubbed ‘Update 2.1,’ the patch finally brings the long-requested metro system, the ability to hang out with romantic partners, radios, and a ton of quality-of-life changes. It drops alongside the Ultimate Edition on December 5 at 4:30pm IST in India/ 12pm CET in Europe. Bear in mind that this is a free downloadable update, so it won’t be included natively in the physical disc versions releasing on the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. That said, the 2.0 Update released in September will be included across all versions, entirely overhauling the perk system and adding a range of tech augmentations, which weren’t present in the original 2020 version.

Once the update goes live, the protagonist V will be able to access the in-game metro service to travel between 19 destinations, punctuated across five railway lines. The public transit system can be accessed via a special card, and the players themselves can chill out on the seats and soak in the sights of Night City, amongst other NPC passengers busy staring at screens or napping. The feature was originally shown in the Cyberpunk 2077 cinematic trailer and three years later, becomes finally accessible after finishing the Konpeki Plaza sequence. Of course, one can always skip the travelling cutscene and just jump into the next location once the immersion starts getting repetitive. Your pocket will also be filled with a radio system, which lets you scroll through multiple frequencies and listen to the music you like while walking through the streets and in vehicles. The music will turn off during dialogue sequences, though.

Since its launch, Cyberpunk 2077 players have expressed their desire to just hang back and spend quality time with their in-game romantic partners. That’s now possible in Update 2.1, with V having the option to invite back people to ‘any of the apartments’ for an unlimited number of times, as long as the romance path has been completed successfully. Another thing that’s replayable is car races, which can be accessed by visiting red flag icons scattered across the map, to make big eddies. One must complete ‘The Beast in Me’ quest for this section to unlock, with CD Projekt Red claiming that the enemy racers’ AI has been made significantly smarter to make these experiences more thrilling and challenging. Adding to the immersion are sightseeing binoculars that let you observe various scenic vistas in the world of Cyberpunk.

Other major improvements include not-so-clunky bike combat, minor bug fixes, and better boss fights. It’s unclear what the developer means by that, though the patch notes detail that the ruthless Adam Smasher can now activate the Sandevistan perk, letting him blink around the map and get close to you before slashing down. A range of visual and lighting enhancements, weapon balance changes, new bikes to purchase, and vehicular tricks are all available in Update 2.1 — a complete list of which you can browse in the official blog post. Cyberpunk 2077 had a rocky launch in 2020, characterised by low framerates and bugs, forcing the developer to fix the game in the following years through numerous patches and hotfixes. It is in a far better state now, with the Phantom Liberty expansion earning it nominations in The Game Awards 2023.

Both Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition and its Update 2.1 release December 5 across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.

Indonesia said it has banned sales of smartphones made by Alphabet’s Google due to rules requiring the use of locally manufactured components, days after blocking sales of tech giant Apple’s iPhone 16 for the same reason.

Indonesia blocked sales of Google Pixel phones because the company has not met the rules which necessitate certain smartphones sold domestically to contain at least 40% of parts manufactured locally.

“We are pushing these rules so that there’s fairness for all investors in Indonesia,” Febri Hendri Antoni Arief, industry ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday. “Google’s products have not adhered to the scheme we set, so they can’t be sold here.”

Google said its Pixel phones were currently not officially distributed in Indonesia.

Febri said consumers can buy Google Pixel phones overseas, so long as they pay the necessary taxes, adding the country would consider deactivating the phones that are illicitly sold.

The block comes a week after Indonesia said it had blocked the sales of iPhone 16 domestically, also for not meeting local content rules.

Companies usually increase the use of domestic components to meet such rules through partnerships with local suppliers or by sourcing parts domestically.

Google and Apple are not among the top smartphone makers in Indonesia. The top two smartphone makers in the first quarter of 2024 were Chinese firm OPPO and South Korean firm Samsung, research firm IDC said in May.

Indonesia has a huge, tech-savvy population, making the Southeast Asian nation a key target market for tech-related investment.

Bhima Yudhistira, director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies think tank, said the move was “pseudo” protectionism that hurts consumers and impacts investor confidence.

“This creates a negative sentiment for investors looking to enter Indonesia,” he said.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

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