Microsoft just announced that it will release NPU-optimized versions of DeepSeek-R1, allowing it to take advantage of AI-optimized hardware found in Copilot+ PCs. According to the Windows Blog, the feature will first arrive on Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs, to be followed by Intel Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) and other chips. The initial release will feature DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, which an AI research team from UC Berkeley has discovered is the smallest model that delivers correct answers, but larger models featuring 7 billion and 14 billion parameters will arrive shortly thereafter.
DeepSeek’s optimizations meant that it needed 11x less compute versus its Western competitors, making it a great model to run on consumer devices. However, it also uses Windows Copilot Runtime so developers can use on-device DeepSeek APIs within their apps.
