Microsoft last week unveiled its new Copilot Plus PCs, designed to usher in a new wave of ai features in Windows that are exclusive to the new laptops. Now, less than two weeks later, Windows enthusiasts have managed to crack Microsoft's flagship ai-powered recovery feature to run on unsupported hardware.
Recall takes advantage of local ai models on the new Copilot Plus PCs to run in the background and take snapshots of everything you've done or seen on your PC. You then get a timeline you can scroll through and the ability to search for photos, documents, conversations, or anything else on your PC. Microsoft positioned Recall as needing the latest neural processing units (NPUs) in new PCs, but you can actually run it on older Arm-powered hardware.
Albacore Windows Observer has created a tool called Amperage, which allows recovery on devices that have an older Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, Microsoft SQ processors, or an Ampere chipset. You must have the latest Windows 11 24H2 update installed on one of these Windows on Arm devices and then the tool will unlock and enable recovery.
This only works on older Windows on Arm hardware right now, but with Copilot Plus PCs coming soon from AMD and Intel, we'll likely see this unlocked much more widely in the coming weeks or months. Microsoft has only now released its ai components for the Windows on Arm platform, the limiting factor for this to work on Intel and AMD-powered hardware.
Technically, you can unlock Recall on x86 devices, but the app won't do much until Microsoft releases the x64 ai components needed to get it up and running. Rumors suggest that both AMD and Intel are close to announcing Copilot Plus PCs, so Microsoft's ai components for those machines could appear soon. I managed to run Recall on a x64 virtual machine running Windows 11 today just to test the initial first run experience.
We may also soon see more of Microsoft's PC Copilot Plus features ported to existing hardware. Remembering that being unlocked to run on much older Arm hardware will no doubt raise questions about why Microsoft is limiting this and many other ai-powered Windows features to new devices that have an NPU capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Microsoft will likely argue that the 40 TOPS requirement sets a foundation for future ai-powered experiences beyond Recall, Image Cocreator, and other ai features that Microsoft demonstrated last week. It also ensures that these functions run on a separate NPU instead of taking over the CPU and GPU and killing the laptop's battery life. But the reality is that Copilot Plus PCs are also designed for Microsoft and its OEM partners to sell new hardware at a time when IDC estimates PC sales will grow this year thanks to the arrival of ai-enabled PCs.
