Microsoft's Recall system is rolling out broadly - but it's not as bad as it first sounded for most

[thewayne]

Apparently testing was pretty good and MS has decided to launch Recall for Windows 11. They have made it opt-in, thus you must specifically enable it before it starts snapshotting your system. This is good.

But there's something better: it doesn't run on most machines out there!

Recall requires a system with an NPU, a Neural Processing Unit. These are additional chips installed on the motherboard that have only been in the sales channel for about a year. I'm also pretty sure that these computers came with a keyboard that had a Copilot key on the bottom row to the right of the space bar, though there may be keyboards with that key sold with computers without the NPU. So if your PC is from 2023 or older, it doesn't have an NPU and won't run Recall.

And yes, there are laptops with NPUs.

Recall is part of a feature package called CoPilot+. From the article: "The only consumer processors that currently support Copilot+ are Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, Intel's Core Ultra 200V-series laptop chips (codenamed Lunar Lake), and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series. Copilot+ features have generally been coming to the Arm-based Qualcomm PCs first and to x86-based Intel and AMD PCs later; Recall and the improved Search are available for both Arm and x86 PCs, while some Click to Do features are currently only available for Arm systems."

Of course there is the problem that when you go to replace your current system in a few years, it's likely that your new box will contain an NPU and you'll get nagged to activate Recall.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/microsoft-rolls-windows-recall-out-to-the-public-nearly-a-year-after-announcing-it/


In an interesting sidenote, Intel's AI chipsets are not selling well, people are really wanting the previous generation known as Raptor Lake. The AI chips are known as Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, I think one name designates laptop chips.

Intel is having all sorts of corporate problems and it's being felt up and down the product line. They're looking at selling off divisions to hunker down and get their act together.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-ai-pc-chips-arent-selling-instead-last-gen-raptor-lake-booms-and-creates-a-shortage

Comments

[warriorsavant]

Interesting-ish. I thought from the title, that Intel was recalling machines, like car companies do. What is this "recall" you mention?

[thewayne]

Recall is a software package by Microsoft that takes screen captures of your computer at random intervals and saves them in an allegedly secure location accessible only by you, so that you can 'recall' previous events.  Amongst the problems is that it could capture medical, banking, porn, or other information that people could consider sensitive.  Fortunately, they made it opt-in whereas in previous testing it was self-loading.

[disneydream06]

YAY that they made it Opt In. :o
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

Well, at least Microsoft has realized that there were reasons people didn't want Recall and have given them the option to get rid of it. (I'd like them to make Copilot similarly completely uninstallable.)

I'm also not surprised that most people don't want those large model processing units on their machines. I could see the use of it for like, distributed computing projects and scientific research, but these companies seem to think we're all going to be so interested in running our own local LLMs and such, and most of us are just not interested in it.

[thewayne]

I am... curious about these NPUs.  I'd like to know more about them and what they can do.  But not in a huge rush to replace my motherboard.  Also wondering about increased power consumption.

[silveradept]

Curious, certainly. I'd like to know what they're being used for that isn't some kind of large model or complex information query.

[thewayne]

I'm curious if they'd improve data cube modeling/queries and such, among other things.