New Windows 11 AI feature Recall runs on CPUs other than Snapdragon X series

Recall is one of the many new Windows 11 AI features that the new Copilot Plus PCs come with. At the core, it constantly takes screenshots of what you're doing on the computer, processes the snapshots, and then lets you search back in time. For example, you can search for a specific product you may have viewed before but can't remember its name by describing it in words.

While this feature does raise some security and privacy concerns, Microsoft claims that all the processing takes place locally. So, in theory, as nothing is reaching any external servers, you should have 100% privacy with features like Recall.

Nonetheless, as Microsoft said, laptops need to meet some specific requirements to enjoy these features, including having an NPU with at least 40 TOPS of AI performance. This is required for the on-device processing of the data, and at the moment, only the new Snapdragon X series processors meet this requirement (preorder the 2024 Surface Pro from Amazon). 

However, it seems that you don't really need a Snapdragon X processor to run Recall on your Windows 11 computer. As developer Albacore showed, you can enable the feature on processors that don't meet the 40 TOPS requirement. The developer showed it working on a system with an unsupported ARM64 processor and noted that it should run on the AMD and Intel systems with too.

Of course, while Recall does run on the ARM64 system, it's not as smooth as Microsoft demoed it on a Snapdragon X series laptop. As you can guess, it's mainly because the unsupported processor doesn't have a powerful NPU to process the snapshots taken by the Windows 11 AI feature. The performance can even degrade when there are too many screenshots to work with.

This shows why Microsoft made a 40 TOPS NPU requirement for systems to meet the Copilot Plus PC standards. Now, although your only options at the moment are Snapdragon X series laptops, we will likely see more systems meeting the requirements when Intel launches Lunar Lake and AMD intros Strix Point.