The new Recall feature on Windows is impressive, but concerns related to both technicality and security abound. Users may wonder whether this is one of those increasingly prevalent AI features that listen in on your conversations and log your activity, hauling troves of personal data back to their company. However, Microsoft claims that the feature will run locally, using new, AI-focused processors to do so. Recall will log pretty much everything you do on your PC, with Microsoft claiming it’s all stored on-device. But that local storage and processing wouldn’t be possible without NPUs (neural processing units) inside the all new ARM64 chips from Qualcomm. If you want Recall, you’ll first need a new PC running on one of the new processors. At the time of writing, that includes the brand-new Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, with upcoming models from other major PC manufacturers.
New, ARM64-based AI processors from Qualcomm were a major focus of Microsoft’s Monday presentation. The Snapdragon X Elite chip is powering AI on a new generation of Windows devices that follow Apple’s lead by consolidating everything to an SoC. Microsoft announced their own Surface laptops and tablets equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite and noted that further models will be coming from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and other hardware partners. ARM systems will power potentially useful features like Recall and other AI tasks, but since there may be a lot of app incompatibility in the early days, it’s unclear whether they can replace x86-64 platforms in the short run. Such a lack of optimized apps were a contributing factor in the failure of Microsoft’s push into ARM with Windows RT over a decade ago, but this time Adobe and other companies are on board.
