Windows 11 Copilot+ AI features like Recall can be enabled without an NPU

News
By
published

Developer demos Recall working without an NPU on current Arm64 CPUs, and says it should work on x86 too.

Albacore, aka @thebookisclosed, showcasing Copilot's Recall working without an NPU.
Albacore, aka @thebookisclosed, showcasing Copilot's Recall working without an NPU. (Image credit: @thebookisclosed on Twitter)

Amidst the controversy around Windows 11's new (mostly-unwanted) Copilot+ features, a developer on Twitter has taken the discussion a step further by revealing that one of the flagship new features, Recall, doesn't require the presence of a powerful NPU after all. This makes sense, though, considering Recall's main functions seem to be automated screen captures and the ability to search through those screen caps' text — two things that modern hardware has been capable of for a while, now. 

The big question is, will these workloads run as fast without an NPU? According to @thebookisclosed, the slow performance seen in the video above can be partially attributed to the screen recording taking place, so it should be faster without it. 

In any case, we're sure that the feature can properly leverage a powerful NPU. However, considering the existing presence of AI cores in the majority of modern consumer GPUs from AMD and Nvidia and that this can clearly be run without them, one wonders why Microsoft is restricting these features so heavily. At least Automatic Super Resolution's restrictions make some degree of sense, but even then earlier versions of AMD FSR and Intel XeSS don't use AI upscaling hardware either, so it should be an optional requirement.

We suppose there would be less to market with Windows 11 and the "AI PC" and its "technical advancements" if the software didn't have artificial limitations built into it. This wouldn't be the first time — for example, the Windows 11 implementation of Auto HDR was first tested in Windows 10 preview builds before being removed from the older OS, likely for the same reasons. I'm still mad about that one.

In any case, it was impressive work from @thebookisclosed to pull this off, so we have to tip the hat. While this testing was done with "current-gen Arm64 hardware", they claim that it should also work on x86-64 CPUs from Intel and AMD, which would certainly make sense considering how truly unimpressive most of these "AI PC" features actually are.

And of course, none of that is even broaching the many ethical and environmental concerns that come with such excessive saturation of AI technology, especially generative AI.

TOPICS
Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ezst036
    This is entirely unsurprising.

    Microsoft wants to move further into the ad-delivery space more strongly, and co-pilot can increase the value of ads - and what I really mean is that Microsoft can charge advertisers even more with "intelligent" promotion spots. (links below)

    So why should ads be limited to if you have an NPU? That would not be a wise limitation when advertising revenue is at stake.

    https://www.techspot.com/news/100386-microsoft-copilot-can-show-third-party-advertising-windows.html
    https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/heres-a-bloat-free-solution-for-microsofts-intrusive-interface-on-the-start-menu-copilot-ai-and-its-annoying-ad-campaign-in-windows-11
    https://www.seroundtable.com/microsoft-advertising-adds-copilot-37037.html
    https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-testing-more-copilot-ads-in-edge/
    https://www.windowslatest.com/2023/10/04/microsoft-slips-ads-into-bing-chat-ai-powered-windows-11-copilot/
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Aside from privacy issues and such, something I haven't seen talked about much is how much space Recall will end up consuming. To quote Ars Technica

    The default allocation for Recall on a 256GB device is 25GB, which can store approximately three months of snapshots. Users can adjust the allocation in their PC settings, with old snapshots being deleted once the allocated storage is full.

    25GB of space for something probably 99.999% of people won't use or adjust is quite significant, especially since this is on top of the 15-20GB of space System Restore can use, plus the rather large hibernation file, and page file, and everything else that Windows can use. If you're using a 256GB drive you're going to easily see nearly half of it unavailable, and after you tack on your preferred office, chat, and other "necessary" programs your next step is going to be "buy a larger drive". To quote a table from Microsoft's page on Recall:

    Device storage capacity
    Storage allocation options for Recall256 GB
    25 GB (default), 10 GB512 GB
    75 GB (default), 50 GB, 25 GB1 TB, or more
    150 GB (default), 100 GB, 75 GB, 50 GB, 25 GB

    If you have a 1TB SSD then by default 15% of your space is immediately reserved for Recall, which is -insane-. Yes you can limit it down, but how many people are going to do this? Probably about the number of people who flush their system restore points and limit its reserved space.

    And think about it, if it's only useful for 3 months, then what use is it really? Not worth 25GB+ of space on my disk that's for sure.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    Yeah, you can also run windows 10 on a pentium II or do video transcoding without a GPU you can do anything without specialized hardware as long as you have enough time and don't care about how much power it will use.
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    If you have a 1TB SSD then by default 15% of your space is immediately reserved for Recall, which is -insane-.
    That's not how windows works, just like the pagefile this will just be an upper limit and not committed from the beginning, it will just start deleting older stuff when reaching this limit but it will not start off being that size, if you don't use it ever it will be zero, or a few Mb if windows uses it for something.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    TerryLaze said:
    Yeah, you can also run windows 10 on a pentium II or do video transcoding without a GPU you can do anything without specialized hardware as long as you have enough time and don't care about how much power it will use.

    That's not how windows works, just like the pagefile this will just be an upper limit and not committed from the beginning, it will just start deleting older stuff when reaching this limit but it will not start off being that size, if you don't use it ever it will be zero, or a few Mb if windows uses it for something.
    I haven't seen anything about dynamic allocation based on disk usage, only that Windows will use 25, 75, or 150GB of space (by default, less if you select it) which says to me it's going to be marked as "reserved", so even if it's not in use by Recall nothing else can touch it, much like if you set your page file size manually to its minimum and maximum sizes, or like Windows does already by reserving 7GB of disk space for updates to ensure they don't fail due to lack of space.
    Reply