Asus Vivobook S15 OLED Copilot+PC

A strong debut for both Copilot+ PCs and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip for Windows

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PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT)

from uk.store.asus.​com

Microsoft decided not to deliver Windows 12 this year, but arguably it’s offering something even better: Copilot+ PCs. These still run Windows 11, but as the name alludes to they’re capable of running Microsoft’s Copilot AI directly on the silicon. To be precise, that means neural processing units (NPUs) that are capable of handling 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Otherwise known as one heck of a lot.

Right now, Qualcomm is the only manufacturer shipping a processor – technically we should call it a system on chip, or SoC, but there are quite enough TLAs to deal with so let’s not be pedantic – capable of 40 TOPS. In fact, it has four such chips available to manufacturers, all of which are rated at 45 NPU TOPS. We summarise them in the table on p55.

As you’ll see from our summary of the other Copilot+ PCs on p54, the “budget” Copilot+ PCs come with either the X Plus or the lowest model in the X Elite range: the X1E-78-100.

But it’s obvious that you’ll get a boost by moving up the range (as is always true with processors), because the two top-most chips provide a dual-core boost and the very top chip, the X1E-84-100, also has significantly higher firepower.

Qualcomm’s monopoly will be short-lived. As we cover in our round-up of Computex 2024 (see p12), both AMD and Intel have announced chips compatible with Copilot+, so expect more choice in the coming months. If you’re buying for a business rather than as a consumer, it looks like you’ll have to wait until autumn for Copilot+ PCs; right now, this is purely a consumer launch.

There are two other more mundane requirements to hit the Copilot+ PC benchmark: the PCs must have at least 16GB of DDR5 or LPDDR5 memory, and a minimum 256GB SSD.

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