Inside the AI PC
Inside the AI PC
Is the AI PC anything more than marketing speak? Barry Collins and Tim Danton find out…
Remember when 3D screens were the next big thing? What about virtual reality? Or 5G? The truth is that the technology R industry loves buzzwords almost as much as it loves the tech itself, and its latest crush is AI PCs.
The trouble is, if you ask five different vendors what an AI PC is, you would likely get different answers. AMD and Intel will explain that it’s all about their new silicon, which now includes neural processing units to go along with CPUs. Nvidia will point to its hugely powerful RTX GPUs. Microsoft will tout Copilot.
Truth is, the definition is hazy. By many definitions, you already have an AI PC to hand via your mobile phone. It’s personal, it computes, and if it’s a recent Apple, Google or Samsung phone, it includes plenty of AI-enhanced features. Magic Eraser is one example.
So, let’s lay down a simple working definition. An AI PC – for the duration of the next pages, at least – is a laptop or desktop PC that includes a processor with an NPU. That means an Intel Core Ultra, any AMD Ryzen processor with Ryzen AI built in, and Apple MacBooks and Mac desktops with an M1, M2 or M3 series chip – but what about poor penniless Nvidia?
With that settled, let’s get to work. What’s the point of an AI PC? What can it actually do? What options are available? And, most importantly, should you buy one?
AI PCS NOW!
If you’re in the market for a new PC and are weighing up whether to invest in an AI PC, you might wonder what advantages it will bring over an ‘ordinary’ PC.
We’ll come to the benefits afforded by the piece of hardware that pretty much defines an AI PC – the neural processing unit (NPU) – shortly, but there’s another distinguishing piece of hardware found on many AI PCs: the Microsoft Copilot key.
The Copilot key was billed as the first major change to PC keyboard layouts in almost 30 years, replacing the menu key to the right of the spacebar. It’s basically a shortcut for opening the Copilot assistant in Windows 11 and is largely redundant anywhere else.