After all the hype around Copilot+ PCs and the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X chips that power them, many have been wondering about the extent of Intel and AMD’s response — and how well they’d be able to pull it off. Well, with the announcement of HP’s AMD Ryzen AI 300-powered OmniBook and Asus’ first Intel Lunar Lake laptop, we have at least one of our answers.
Just a month or so after the release of the first Copilot+ PCs, new Intel and AMD-powered AI PCs have been announced and they’ll be ready to run Copilot+ features — as soon as Microsoft lets them. The first, the HP OmniBook Ultra, will go on sale in August and — on the outside — is very similar looking to last month’s Snapdragon-powered OmniBook X. It has the same 14-inch display and a very similar chassis, but the chip on the inside is very different.
With 55 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of AI performance, the Ryzen AI 300 processor beats Qualcomm’s 45 TOPS NPU — but we all know that’s not what’s really important. As an x86 chip, the Ryzen can run any app or game you could want on Windows without having to worry about emulation, but the real question is — how long can it run them for in terms of battery life?
Setting AI aside for a moment, the other big point of interest with the Snapdragon chips is their Arm architecture and the massive battery life improvements it provides. Some surveys are even suggesting it’s the battery life that’s truly driving Copilot+ PC sales in the first place.
If AMD can’t match Qualcomm’s power efficiency, or at least substantially improve on their own older chips, it could be a bit of a hard sell. Just imagine people making the decision between two Windows laptops that have almost the same AI capabilities, but one can last many hours longer than the other. The choice is painfully obvious.
The exact same problem could play to Intel, perhaps even more so since it usually loses out to AMD’s mobile chips in terms of battery performance. Asus’ new Lunar Lake laptop, the ExpertBook P5, doesn’t actually namedrop the processor in the currently released specs. But considering its 45+ TOPS, most people have already agreed that the “next-generation Intel Core Ultra” inside this laptop could only be Lunar Lake. With its 2.5K 144Hz display, military-grade aluminum chassis, and up to 3TB of storage, the laptop has plenty to offer.
Once Microsoft releases the software update that allows non-Qualcomm PCs to run Copilot+ features, there won’t be a lot of differences between the AI experiences these PCs offer. That’s why the battery life instead might become the deciding factor for a lot of buyers — so we’re waiting with bated breath for more details and benchmarks.
