Written by Max A. Charney
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft plans to unveil several hardware and software related to consumer devices on Monday at an event at its campus in Redmond, Washington.
The Windows maker is expected to announce new versions of its Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop powered by Qualcomm chips based on Arm Holdings' architecture.
After Intel's processors dominated the personal computer market for decades, Qualcomm and other low-power Arm component makers have been trying to compete in the Windows-PC market.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip contains a so-called neural processing unit designed to speed up AI-focused applications, such as Microsoft's Copilot software.
Microsoft's product event is held the day before the start of the annual developer conference and is open to journalists and industry analysts to attend in person. There will be no live streaming.
Microsoft aims to extend its early advantage in the race to develop AI tools that consumers are willing to pay for. The partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI has helped it jump ahead of Alphabet as other Big Tech companies compete to dominate the emerging space.
Last week, OpenAI and Alphabet's Google unveiled dueling AI technology that can respond and be interrupted by voice in real time, both features of realistic voice conversations that AI voice assistants have found challenging. . Google also announced that it will be rolling out some generative AI features to its lucrative search engine.
The PC industry has been under increasing pressure from Apple since it launched custom chips based on Arm designs and retired Intel processors. Apple-designed processors gave Mac computers better battery life and faster performance than competing chips that consumed more energy.
Microsoft appointed Qualcomm in 2016 to lead efforts to migrate its Windows operating system to Arm chip designs. Qualcomm has exclusive rights to Microsoft Windows devices, which expire this year. Other chip designers, such as Nvidia, are also working on producing their own Arm-based PC chips, Reuters previously reported.
(Reporting by Max A. Charney in Seattle; Additional reporting by Noel Landewicz in Oakland, California; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
