Back when Microsoft first launched Windows 11 in 2021, Panos Panay, the company’s EVP & Chief Product Officer, said at that time that Windows 11 was “the first chapter in the next era of Windows”. Now, over a year later, we may finally be starting to understand what Microsoft meant by that.
At AMD’s CES 2023 keynote earlier this month, Panos Panay was invited onto the stage by the host and AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su. The discussion was mainly about AMD’s new AI engine inside the new Ryzen 7040 series chips, and how it would help Microsoft usher in the next generation of software powered by AI.
He said:
AI is the defining technology of our time, it’s like nothing I have ever seen before. It’s transforming industries, it’s improving our daily lives on many ways – some of it you see, some of it you don’t see -, and we are right now right this moment at an inflexion point. This is where computing from the cloud to the edge is becoming more and more intelligent, more personal, and it’s all done by harnessing the power of AI.
[..]
.. now AMD is also at the forefront of AI technology, with Ryzen 7040 series, alongside Windows 11. It is our next step in this journey together
After that, the senior Microsoft exec teased a bit about the next generation of Windows too, which will have a lot more to do with AI. While AI is not exactly new on Windows, its integration is likely going to scale up potentially exponentially as the Redmond giant is working on ways for it. Windows 12 could be deeply integrated with the cloud as processing AI is very intensive.
AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows, quite literally. Like these large generative models, think language models, code gen models, image models; these models are so powerful, so delightful, so useful, personal. But they are also very compute intensive, and so we haven’t been able to do this before. We have never seen these intense workloads at this scale before, and they’re right here. It’s gonna need an operating system that blurs the line between cloud and edge, and that’s what we are doing right now
A possible cloud-based future for Windows is probably good news for consumers in terms of system requirements as well, something that has always been a hot topic of discussion in the case of Windows 11. If not, then devices which have dedicated AI processing hardware will likely be the norm. Perhaps next-gen AI-powered Windows 12 is Microsoft’s bigger master plan that explains the recent rumors of the company’s interest in acquiring OpenAI and integrating ChatGPT with Bing.
Source: AMD (YouTube) via Computer World