What to expect from Microsoft’s Surface event today

One of Microsoft’s most important hardware events in years is about to happen. It’s not Microsoft Build – the company’s developer conference – which starts on Tuesday. Instead, Microsoft will be 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. It’s Microsoft’s latest attempt to move to Arm — and one that the company believes will finally work. The change should provide much better battery life; and if early rumors are true, Qualcomm’s chip should be powerful enough to keep up with the Intel processors it’s replacing.

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 monitor everything you do on your machine Windows 11 and then let you tell the AI ​​what you’ve been up to. Microsoft is reportedly building dozens of language models into the system so that these chips can run AI capabilities locally.

Today’s Surface event could also be the start of a bigger push from Microsoft. There are rumors that many more “AI PC” laptops using Qualcomm’s new chip are on the way. During the event, we will probably also hear from other Machines equipped with Snapdragon X from companies 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 will be able to participate — so keep an eye out On the edge for live coverage of today’s news when the event begins at 10am PT / 1pm ET.