You’re going to be hearing an awful lot about AI PCs this year, if CES 2024 is anything to go by. Chipmakers Intel and AMD, as well as all the major PC makers, are pushing the AI PC concept hard. But what is an AI PC and is it worth investing in one at this early stage? Let’s dig deeper.
What Is An AI PC?
A so-called AI PC will contain one of the newly launched processors from Intel or AMD that includes something called a neural processing unit (NPU).
Until now, most AI workloads have been handled by the graphics processing unit (GPU), which are the chips primarily designed to handle graphics and gaming. However new processor ranges such as Intel’s Core Ultra or AMD’s Ryzen 8000G include an NPU to take on the bulk of the AI workloads.
“The GPU is currently the fastest AI processing unit,” AMD’s senior processor technical marketing manager, Donny Woligroski, told me at a CES 2024 briefing. “You’re going to see that performance cross over, with the NPU doing the same levels of [AI] performance as the GPU.”
New laptop and desktop PC ranges from companies such as Lenovo, Dell and HP will be branded an “AI PC” if they include one of these new processors with an NPU.
You may also notice a new key on the keyboard of these PCs. Selected Windows 11 laptops are now shipping with a Windows Copilot key, to the right of the ALT key. This provides a shortcut to the Windows Copilot AI that has been built into Windows 11.
This is hardly the greatest technological innovation of the modern age—you could already access Copilot using the Windows Key + C shortcut combo. But it will make Microsoft’s AI assistant even harder to ignore.
What Will An AI PC Do?
This is the 64-million-dollar question because, frankly, even the PC makers are struggling to formulate clear answers on what these machines will be capable of.
In the short term, you might see AI PCs starting to handle AI tasks locally instead of relying on cloud services such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. In a demonstration at CES 2024 earlier this week, Lenovo showed me a prototype of its forthcoming AI PC service where the AI assistant could help you access features on your PC (ie. “Put my laptop into battery-saving mode”) or answer questions about how much memory the PC has.
Lenovo’s assistant will also perform tasks such as summarizing long documents or writing replies to emails. This can all be done without relying on cloud services, meaning you’ll still be able to use the AI tools even without an internet connection.
That might not be a massive deal for consumers—how many times do you use a PC without an internet connection these days? However, it could be a bigger deal for businesses, who can run AI services locally, without the security fears of sending sensitive information to cloud AI services.
However, when it comes to the bigger picture of what these AI PCs will do that we can’t already get from cloud AI services, the answers start to get wooly.
At an Intel press conference here at CES, top executives from Dell, Lenovo and HP were asked what their AI PCs will do for buyers, and their answers were long on hyperbole, but short on concrete benefits.
“The PC you’ve known before is going to be radically different,” said Sam Burd, president of Dell’s Client Solutions Group. “The PC is the productivity tool and AI is a great reason to refresh.”
“This will be a computing revolution,” agreed HP’s president of personal computing, Alex Cho, but he too failed to provide clear examples of what an AI PC will be capable of either.
In fairness to the PC makers, it may be because they simply don’t know. PCs fitted with NPUs have only been on the market for a matter of weeks and it will take time for developers to exploit their capabilities.
“What you’re doing on an AI PC in 2024 is going to be radically different to 2026,” said Intel’s executive vice president for client computing, Michelle Johnston Holthaus.
AMD’s Donny Woligroski agrees. “It will probably be the end of 2025 before you really start to see what an AI PC is capable of,” he told me.
AI and Windows 12
The success or otherwise of AI PCs may hinge on the AI features Microsoft chooses to incorporate in the next version of Windows.
Microsoft and PC vendors have dropped heavy hints that Windows 12 will launch later this year, with an expected focus on AI. The current iteration of Windows Copilot in Windows 11 has got nowhere near the capabilities that Microsoft initially promised, but building a new OS with AI built in from the start gives Microsoft a chance to make amends. And put clear water between Windows and macOS, which has yet to embrace AI in any meaningful way.
Speaking at Intel’s event, Microsoft’s Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president for Windows and devices, said the company is “thinking about how we rebuild the OS to take advantage of these AI capabilities,” suggesting that more of the AI may run locally on the NPU, rather than running everything in the cloud.
AMD’s Woligroski said he too believed that Microsoft would be “heavily betting” on the Copilot capabilities in Windows 12, with the company “taking advantage of the NPU” wherever possible.
Should You Buy An AI PC Now?
With so much uncertainty about what an AI PC will actually be capable of doing, and with a new version of Windows almost certain to arrive in 2024, it would seem premature to buy a new PC purely on the strength of its AI capabilites at this time. It would make more sense to wait for Windows 12 (likely to be released in the second half of this year) and give developers a chance to start exploiting the new AI chips first.
However, if you need to buy a new PC for other reasons, it certainly makes sense to future-proof yourself by buying an AI PC with that all-important NPU included. Everyday software is likely to take advantage of that NPU in one form or another, even if it’s doing something as simple as blurring the background on video calls or filtering out background noise on audio recordings. Windows 12 may even make an NPU a requirement.
Even if you won’t use the AI services today, you never know what might emerge in the future.