What to expect from Microsoft’s Surface event today

One of the most important hardware events for Microsoft in years is about to take place. It’s not Microsoft Build – the company’s developers conference – which begins on Tuesday. Instead, Microsoft is holding a small event today, May 20, to talk about its upcoming Surface devices.

At the event, we expect Microsoft to announce new versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, both running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors. This is Microsoft’s latest attempt to move to Arm – and one that the company says will finally live on. The change should deliver much better battery life; and if early rumors are true, Qualcomm’s chip should be powerful enough to keep pace with the Intel processors it replaces.

These devices are also expected to include dedicated AI hardware accelerators called NPUs to better support Windows 11’s upcoming AI features. One of these rumored features, AI Explorer, is supposed to keep track of everything you done on your Windows 11 computer, then let you tell the AI ​​what you did. Microsoft is reportedly integrating dozens of language models into the system so that these chips can run AI functionalities locally.

Today’s Surface event could also be the start of a bigger initiative from Microsoft. Many more “AI PC” laptops using Qualcomm’s new chip are rumored to be on the way. Around the event we will probably also hear about other Snapdragon X-equipped machines like Asus, Dell, and Lenovo. Microsoft is apparently very confident that the new Arm chips will put Windows machines back in the game against Apple’s powerful but battery-efficient computers.

The event will not be broadcast, only journalists are allowed to attend, so keep an eye out The edge for live coverage of today’s news when the event kicks off at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET.