Microsoft is looking to set new standards for PC hardware specifications, as the tech giant apparently plans to set a 16GB RAM requirement for any AI-enabled PC.
This comes from a trend force market research report (reported by TechPowerUp), and the most likely reason is to boost AI PCs, PCs that use built-in AI acceleration for several native AI features in Windows 11 23H2.
This is especially true of Copilot, an AI chatbot that automates and generates work. Microsoft has been pushing this feature especially hard, including a dedicated Copilot key on Windows keyboards similar to the Windows key.
Copilot and other Microsoft AI tools will require certain hardware requirements for local acceleration, the first being Nuclear Nuclear Unit (Neural Processing Unit) which is used for dedicated processing and the second is memory. Hence, Microsoft requires AI PCs to have at least 16GB of RAM for native and cloud-based Copilot features to work.
16 GB should be the standard in the future
There are many other Copilot announcements, such as the dedicated Copilot key, the Copilot Pro subscription service that adds additional information Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT Plusas well as a feature that is currently being tested and that customize Copilot chat responses based on previous chats by saving them.
And while the aforementioned revelations have been controversial, the 16GB RAM requirement for all Windows AI PCs is easily one of the best announcements related to Copilot and Windows AI in general.
In fact, 16GB should be a RAM standard for any Windows laptop and desktop in the future. With rising laptop costs starting during the pandemic and showing no signs of slowing down, it's honestly unbelievable that any PC can launch with 8GB or even an abysmal 4GB of RAM.
Hopefully, AI-enabled laptops and desktops will not only see a 16GB base in 2024 and beyond (with commercial PCs coming in at 32GB or even 64GB standards), but this requirement will extend to PCs without AI in general. As manufacturers see that customers expect computers to meet that standard, change is likely to occur.
Let's keep our fingers crossed that this supposed Microsoft initiative is the push that the PC industry needs to stop launching machines with so little RAM, since it directly harms the performance of said machines.
