Windows 11’s new Recall feature has been hacked to work on unsupported hardware

Microsoft revealed its new Copilot Plus PCs last week, designed to usher in a new wave of AI features in Windows exclusive to new laptops. Now, less than two weeks later, Windows enthusiasts have managed to crack Microsoft’s flagship AI-based Recall feature to run on unsupported hardware.

Recall leverages local AI models on new Copilot Plus PCs to run in the background and take snapshots of everything you’ve done or seen on your PC. You then get a timeline you can scroll through and the ability to search for photos, documents, conversations, or anything else on your PC. Microsoft has positioned Recall as needing the latest neural processing units (NPU) on new PCs, but you can actually run it on older Arm-equipped hardware.

Albacore Windows watcher has created a tool called Amperage, which enables Recall on devices that have an older Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, Microsoft SQ processors, or an Ampere chipset. You need to have the latest Windows 11 24H2 update installed on one of these Windows on Arm devices and then the tool will unlock and activate Recall.

This only works on older Windows on Arm hardware at the moment, but with Copilot Plus PCs coming from AMD and Intel soon, we’ll likely see this unlocked much more widely in the coming weeks or months. Microsoft has only published its AI components for the Windows on Arm platform now, the limiting factor in getting it to work on Intel and AMD-powered hardware.

You can technically unlock Recall on x86 devices, but the app won’t do much until Microsoft publishes the x64 AI components needed to get it up and running. Rumors suggest that both AMD and Intel are close to announcing Copilot Plus PCs, so Microsoft’s AI components for these machines could appear soon. I managed to get Recall running on a Windows 11 x64 virtual machine earlier today just to test the initial first-run experience.

We may see more features from Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PC ported to existing hardware soon. Remember being jailbroken to run on much older Arm hardware will undoubtedly raise questions about why Microsoft is limiting this and many other AI-powered Windows features to new devices that have an NPU capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

Microsoft will likely argue that the 40 TOPS requirement establishes a baseline for future AI-based experiences beyond Recall, Image Cocreator, and other AI features that Microsoft demonstrated last week. It also ensures that these features run on a separate NPU, rather than taking over the CPU and GPU and killing the laptop’s battery life. But the reality is that Copilot Plus PCs are also designed for Microsoft and its OEM partners to sell new hardware at a time when IDC estimates PC sales will grow this year thanks to the arrival of AI-capable PCs.