Over the last two years, the demand for personal computers has declined. While all PC vendors tried hard to add new features and form factors, demand for PCs slid. This decline contrasts the COVID-19 days of 2020 and 2021, when companies sent people home to work, and PC demand rose significantly.
On the day before CES started, Intel invited top execs from Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Microsoft to kick off what will be looked back on as a historic meeting where Intel and their partners began promoting what is being called the era of the AI PC. Although AMD and Qualcomm were not at this meeting, they will also have new powerful PC processors that manufacturers will use in AI PCs.
The key processors driving the AI PC will be Intel’s Core Ultra, AMD’s Ryzen AI, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite. AI, in general, is beginning to energize the tech world. IT, enterprises, mid-sized businesses, and even small businesses need AI to compete. Also, creatives and gamers already use AI in their work and entertainment.
Indeed, AI will be integrated into our tech-related apps and services. But to make AI as effective as possible demands serious horsepower at the CPU, GPU, and NPU levels. To date, most of that serious processing power has been done on the back end by large systems, many with supercomputing engines that train large language models (LLMs) to generate the AI answers to prompts and questions.
However, powering these computers takes enormous energy and high costs. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and other high-end processors are used in the supercomputing back ends that drive Generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s CoPilot, and other similar AI apps and services.
This demand for high-powered processors has led the PC industry to create a new class of processors used in personal computers, allowing them to do more local AI training and processing on the PC itself.
This chip evolution will become more important since people have much of their content, data, and images known as small language models (SLMs) that can train AI content locally. At the same time, especially in IT, enterprise, and medium-sized businesses, company information securely partitioned on an employee’s AI PC could also be trained and contribute to a company’s LLMs since work on an employee’s PC includes company-related email, projects, etc.
The expansion of processing power will make personal computers even more critical in the future. It will also drive what the PC industry believes will be an increasing demand for PCs over the next 2-4 years as enterprises, businesses, educators, and consumers will, at some point, want to have AI-powered PCs to use in all aspects of their business, learning and personal activities.
While PC demand was negative in 2022 and 2023, PC forecasters believe 2024 will see a slight uptick in demand this year. Still, they could accelerate significantly in 2025 and beyond as a new PC refresh cycle begins in earnest.
Calling this the era of the AI PC may be viewed as a marketing ploy. But this is one of the more critical eras where the AI PC becomes more important to all aspects of our future of work, learning, and entertainment. And it is bound to re-energize the PC industry and tech world.
Over my 45+ years in the PC industry, I have witnessed quite a few inflection points, starting with the introduction of the PC itself and followed by desktop publishing, multimedia computing, laptops and portables, the internet, hand-held music players, smartphones, and more recently smart wearables and generative AI.
The AI PC is another vital inflection point for tech and the PC industry. It will write another chapter where the personal computer becomes more important in the age of AI and will be a tool that makes AI more meaningful and accessible to everyone.