this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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TLDR:
Windows 11 v24H2 and beyond will have Recall installed on every system. Attempting to remove Recall will now break some file explorer features such as tabs.

YT Video (5min)

Invidious Link

Original Github Issue

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Might be a stupid question but this requires a NPU right? I told some fellas about it and there response was something like does not matter because they have older hardware so it can't run anyway. So what happens to win 11 PCs with no NPU?

[–] 0x0 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

AFAIK Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, which in and of itself limits hardware ('cos who cares about ewaste, right?), but am unaware of anything hardware-specific for "AI".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

From https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/retrace-your-steps-with-recall-aa03f8a0-a78b-4b3e-b0a1-2eb8ac48701c

Your PC needs the following minimum system requirements for Recall:

  • A Copilot+ PC

That links to https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/copilot-plus-pcs#faq1

Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 AI PCs that are powered by a turbocharged neural processing unit (NPU) – a specialised computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation – that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So what happens when a win 11 PC with no NPU gets updated to the version of windows with recall and recall is installed? Does it just sit dormant like it's deactivated because there are tons of win 11 PC that have no NPU.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

I assume that's what happens, but you know what happens when you do that!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It probably does, like Cortana after they deactivated the servers.

You couldn't remove it for a good while, so there was a gap where it would be stuck there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

turbocharged

I wonder where the exhaust fumes come from for the turbocharger. How many cylinders do you think the engine of an average Copilot+ PC have? How much extra torque can they get out of it?

Fuck idiotic marketing, words have meaning.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

This one annoys me almost as much as "overdrive." And Intel was guilty of that one, back in the 90's.

That word does not mean what everyone thinks it means...

[–] 0x0 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So just the Surface thingies?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] 0x0 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So they're expanding... still seems to be not all that much hardware support, weird that they're pushing it so soon.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Recall was the headline feature for Copilot+ PCs.

When a wave of ARM powered Windows laptops, and now a few desktops launched, they were all Copilot+ for whatever reason. They all marketed the NPU, but struggled to really say what the NPU unlocked that you couldn't do with a CPU or GPU. Other marketing gimmicks were a better background blur and an AI drawing assistant in I think paint. I think you could also do "AI stuff" in photos, but don't think that was local.

Honestly, I think everyone missed the punchline on ARM. The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks. But clearly a PM thought so and now they're trying to save face. Really taking advantage of ARM and pushing for battery life, by optimizing the kernal and changing what happens in standby, would probably be a bigger engineering lift.

/Thoughts from a rando who bought an ARM powered Windows laptop and generally likes it but has never touched the NPU enabled stuff

[–] 0x0 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks.

But how else are you gonna bring down battery life to be on par with x86?

/s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

lol. Amusingly, my wife's Dell Latitude 7400 with an i3 has much better stand by battery life than my 7x slim. The slim does wake up a ton faster - by the time the lid is open it's already doing facial unlock and it it sees me it unlocks immediately and is "fully awake", but I suspect this is achieved at the expense of more battery consumption while sleeping.

The 7x slim loses around 5% / day when asleep :(

[–] 0x0 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Which OSes? Newer windows relies on newer CPU sleep states in that it doesn't actually suspend to disk/hibernate but just sleeps, trickling the battery.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Both are windows 11. It wouldn't surprise me if the older laptop doesn't support the new sleep state. I would personally trade slower wakeup for less battery use while sleeping. I don't use the laptop every day and it's kind of a bummer when I turn it on and find out it lost 20% of its charge between uses.

Even when it's "shutdown" the Lenovo 7x slim doesn't appear to actually be off.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Recall does not utilize NPU, people got it running on pre X Elite Arm PCs.