Products

Here is Asus Vivobook S 15 with Snapdragon X Elite. Testing the first AI Pc

What will the new notebooks with the Copilot+ Pc label look like? Will Qualcomm be able to compete with Apple, Intel and AMD? Our first impressions

19 June 2024

3' min read

The question is: are we really ready for the new laptops enhanced with generative AI? Better yet: are these machines ready to fulfil the promises of Microsoft Copilot and generative AI more generally? We tested the Asus Vivobook S 15, one of the first notebooks to carry the Microsoft Copilot+ PC creation sticker and an ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite platform.

A premise before we begin: the ARM architecture, in many ways, is close to that of processors for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This means great efficiency and low power consumption. However, compared to the dominant X86 platform of AMD and Intel, applications have to be 'rewritten' by developers. In practice, most have already been optimised, but it may happen that some have to be translated in real time, resulting in a higher CPU load and thus a loss of autonomy.

It should also be pointed out immediately that what we understood in terms of performance could change from notebook to notebook with the same processor. Therefore, each Copilot+ PC with ARM architecture might behave differently depending on the manufacturer. Having exhausted the caveats, it must be said straight away that we are dealing with something new, a promising start but not a revolution. On paper, the promise is one of higher performance than a MacBook (+65% faster than the Air M3) and very low power consumption. According to magazines that have started comparing benchmarks, it is faster than an Apple product in some situations but the experience is less seamless. Macs are less erratic. Even compared to X86 machines there are advantages, such as powering up, which is like having a tablet.

The Asus Vivobook S 15 has a battery life of 18 hours, heats up very little and never goes under stress. We are talking about a €1,299 machine for professionals, not a workstation or even a computer for gamers.

The display is very nice: a 15.6-inch OLED, 120Hz refresh, HDR and brightness of up to 600 nits. The battery is a 70Wh with 90W charging. The autonomy is the real strong point. With optimised apps, consumption is very low indeed.

The processor is, as we said, a Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 at 3.4GHz on ARM architecture with a 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for 75 TOPS total. TOPS is the unit of measurement for this new generation of Copilot+ PCs. Microsoft has created this new label to certify computers that have at least 40 TOPS of NPU power, since 40 TOPS is the computing power required to be able to handle certain generative AI functions locally. We are talking about a minimum requirement, so we don't yet know how these machines will perform with functions such as generating customised images based on textual prompts, real-time translation of any audio, including podcasts and video calls, subtitle generation or Recall, which is the most interesting new AI-based functionality because it tracks PC usage. It is an application that tracks web browsing in voice chats, creating a history stored on the computer that the user can retrieve even after several months.

Here, Microsoft has chosen not to make it immediately available, perhaps because of privacy concerns or perhaps because of processing capacity. It will have to be evaluated. It is still too early to tell whether Snapdragon on ARM is ready to take over from AMD and Intel on X86. The impression is that a comparison is starting to be made that, with Windows 12, which will be released perhaps as early as this year and will be called Windows 12, the licence will be unified (we don't know at what price) because it will be taken for granted that every Windows 12 PC will have AI integrated.

Luca TremoladaGiornalista
- @lucatremolada
- LinkedIn
Luogo: Milano via Monte Rosa 91
Lingue parlate: Inglese, Francese
Argomenti: Tecnologia, scienza, finanza, startup, dati
Premi: Premio Gabriele Lanfredini sull’informazione; Premio giornalistico State Street, categoria "Innovation"; DStars 2019, categoria journalism
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