AI development on a Copilot+ PC? Not yet
Microsoft and its hardware partners recently launched its Copilot+ PCs, powered by Arm CPUs with built-in neural processing units. They’re an interesting redirection from the previous mainstream x64 platforms, focused initially on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Arm processors and running the latest builds of Microsoft’s Windows on Arm. Buy one now, and it’s already running the 24H2 build of Windows 11, at least a couple of months before 24H2 reaches other hardware.
Out of the box, the Copilot+ is a fast PC, with all the features we’ve come to expect from a modern laptop. Battery life is excellent, and Arm-native benchmarks are as good as, or in some cases better than, most Intel or AMD-based hardware. They even give Apple’s M2 and M3 Arm processors a run for their money. That makes them ideal for most common development tasks using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Both have Arm64 builds, so they don’t need to run through the added complexity that comes with Windows On Arm’s Prism emulation layer.