Rather than launch a new one major release of Windows, although Microsoft has repeatedly expressed its orientation towards reintroducing three-yearly releases of a new operating system (as happened in the past…), the company led by Satya Nadella could condense Windows 11 24H2 all the new features initially planned for Windows 12.
While Dell had recently let slip the indiscretion about the release of Windows 11 24H1 in April 2024, according to sources close to Microsoft, the company intends to introduce so many new features with the second feature update of the year that Windows 11 24H2 will look a lot like a new version of the platform. And in our opinion, Windows 11 24H1 will ultimately be just a package Momentwith a limited number of features.
Windows 11 24H2: when will it arrive
A “full-bodied” update package, as Windows 11 24H2 will be, is destined to introduce experiences Of artificial intelligence next generation. Hardware manufacturers, partners of Microsoft, are reviewing the specifications of their devices to support the “AI race”, with generative models which will increasingly also work locally, and not only by exploiting cloud resources. What better opportunity to restart the sales Of PC desktop, which has been at a standstill lately, and support those of portable systems?
Several PC manufacturers will unveil a series of systems capable of supporting processing related to the use of artificial intelligence applications as early as next June (probably at the beginning of the month, coinciding with the next edition of the Computex of Taipei). Thus, it seems that Microsoft is rushing ahead to the release of the definitive version of Windows 11 24H2 already during the month of September 2024.
The idea of a “rapid” launch therefore seems to have faded Windows 12. A decision taken, most likely, also due to the changes that have affected the Windows division at Microsoft: the historic leader Panos Panay has in fact decided to abandon the project, leaving the company after 19 years.
New operating system hand in hand with AI PCs
In the near future we will talk more and more frequently about a new category of computers, the so-called PC AI. These are systems designed to support processing related to artificial intelligence.
Only and exclusively for AI PCs based on Windows 11 24H2, Microsoft would have prescribed a RAM memory allocation of no less than 16 GB. Not only. To adequately support AI processing, new generation systems should ensure at least 40 TOPS in terms of computing power.
TOPS stands for “tera operations per second” and is a unit of measurement used to evaluate the performance of devices or systems dedicated to performing mathematical operations, such as artificial intelligence processors and neural processing units (NPU). A “teraoperation” equals one trillion operations per second: 40 TOPS equals 40,000 billion operations per second.
The value on which Microsoft technicians would have oriented themselves would be obtainable with the use of one Dedicated GPU and with the adoption of efficient NPUs capable of assisting processing such as voice recognition, artificial vision, content generation (also with a multimodal approach) and other tasks related to artificial intelligence.
I requirements, which in any case will only be valid for AI PCs, promise to be quite challenging. Just keep in mind that the combined power of CPU, GPU and NPU in current chips Intel Meteor Lake does not exceed 34 TOPS as a maximum value.
It is already known, however, that the AMD Ryzen 8000 (Strix Point) and the ARM-derived Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoCs will both be able to offer around 45 TOPS.