If you bought a laptop in the last couple of years and it is not labeled a "Copilot+ PC," the label is not marketing fluff you can ignore — it gates a specific, short list of features. Whether that list matters to you is a separate question from whether your laptop has it, and most people asking the second question have never used any of the first.
The number that decides it
Per Microsoft's own published requirements, a Copilot+ PC needs a processor with a neural processing unit rated at 40 TOPS or higher, alongside at least 16GB of memory, 256GB of storage, and Windows 11 version 24H2 or newer. TOPS stands for trillion operations per second, and it is a measure of the NPU specifically — the chip block built for running small AI models locally — not of the processor as a whole. A laptop can have a fast CPU and a fast GPU and still fail this requirement outright if its NPU sits under 40 TOPS, because the number is a floor, not an average across the chip.
What a Copilot+ PC does that yours might not
Per Microsoft's own description of the split, five features are reserved for machines that clear the NPU bar: Recall, which lets you search your PC's history by describing what you remember rather than a file name; live captions that translate audio from dozens of languages in real time; Cocreator, which generates images from a prompt inside Paint; Windows Studio Effects for video calls; and a set of automatic photo-editing tools. Microsoft's stated reason for gating these behind local NPU hardware is that they run entirely on the device rather than sending anything to a server — the pitch is privacy and speed, not that the feature is otherwise impossible.
What you are not actually missing
This is the part that gets muddled the most: Copilot the assistant, the chat window in Windows and in Office, runs in the cloud and works the same on a Copilot+ PC and on a laptop from five years ago. The NPU threshold does not gate Copilot itself, web search, or most of what people mean when they say "AI" in a Windows context. It gates a specific handful of on-device conveniences, and for someone who has never opened Recall or used live-caption translation, missing the badge changes nothing they do in a normal week.
What actually clears the bar right now
Microsoft names Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series, AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series, and Intel's Core Ultra 200V generation and newer as qualifying platforms. Intel's newest generation raises that further: Panther Lake's own NPU is rated at 50 TOPS, comfortably above the 40 TOPS floor, though — same caveat as always with that chip — only on the configurations Intel actually ships with the full silicon. An older Intel or AMD laptop, even a fast one, almost certainly falls short simply because it shipped before either company put a large enough NPU on the die at all.
So what do you actually check
If a laptop was sold as a "Copilot+ PC" on the box, it clears 40 TOPS and the rest of the checklist by definition — that is what the label means. If it was not, assume it does not have the five gated features and move on, because for the overwhelming majority of what a laptop does, the difference is a name on a sticker and not a limitation you will run into.
Chip specifications keep arriving with a floor to clear and a footnote attached, which is the same shape as the Snapdragon X2 Elite numbers being compared against Apple's M5 this month — a real number, measured under conditions worth reading before it changes anything about the laptop on your desk.
Last updated September 23, 2026