New hints suggest that Windows 12 will arrive in 2024

At the end of October, we heard that the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite might run Windows 12. While this is an assumption based on the "Windows OS" string present in the Qualcomm presentation files for the new chip, while the Intel systems present for comparison purposes in the documents explicitely ran Windows 11, a new report reveals that Windows 12 will be unleashed in the first half of 2024.

A recent report by Taiwan's Commercial Times (CTEE), which was spotted by gHacks Technology News, quotes insiders familiar with the matter who might have revealed that Microsoft Windows 12 (the name is not set in stone yet, of course) is scheduled to arrive "by June 2024" and that the same year will see the focus of the Redmond-based tech giant shift even more towards AI. The list of tech insiders who spoke to CTEE includes executives from Asus, Quanta Computer, and Gigabyte.

Sadly, there are no other details about the AI side of the story right now, but since Microsoft unveiled already the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and Azure Cobalt CPU, the latter being an ARM chip aimed at general purpose workloads on Microsoft Cloud, it wouldn't be surprising to see the brand back in the desktop PC market with dedicated AI processors designed to work flawlessly with Windows 12.

However, Windows 11 development continues and a reference to Windows 11 24H2 surfaced earlier this week in a new policy named Enable Delegated Managed Service Account logons. This feature update should, as its name suggest, arrive in the second half of next year. Remains to see if Windows 12 will be already available when that happens or they will arrive (more or less) simultaneously.