There is a lot of hullabaloo about the advent of the AI PC. Is there such a thing or has the marketing gone too far?
There are a few questions to be answered. What is an AI PC? Do you need one? And how do you get one? Setting aside the frothy discussions about AI marketing and putting AI into everything, is there really a legit AI PC? Let’s get into it and spill the tea.
What is an AI PC?
First off, what is classified as an AI PC? Essentially, it is a PC that has one of the newer CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra CPU, GPU or NPU capabilities. Not to take away from newer technology, but most users would naturally purchase the latest technology anyway as part of their upgrade cycle. While AI capabilities in a PC sounds interesting on the surface, it is mostly untapped potential today. The applications and use cases haven’t caught up with the hardware capabilities yet. Will they? Probably for some use cases, but likely not for most enterprise users.
Hard to find product
Aside from simply purchasing the latest model of your favorite vendor, let’s say you want or need an AI PC. Where do you get one? If you look at the major PC players (Dell, HP, Lenovo), none of them have a category of “AI PCs”. This seems very counter to the marketing around AI PCs. Even though the marketing for AI PCs has been out for many months, today there is still very little mention of AI on all three vendor’s websites. Only Dell mentions AI but in the context of an ‘AI-ready’ PC. But is that the illusive AI PC? If you look at the details of each vendor’s latest products, AI PC isn’t mentioned. However, the AI enhanced capabilities are, in reality, just the latest updated configuration of their respective product lines. This is likely confusing to buyers who are sold on an AI PC, but can’t find them.
Digging into details
Beside the AI PC marketing, there actually is new and very interesting innovation coming from the CPU, GPU, and NPU companies that will benefit the PC manufacturers and ultimately users. For example, Intel’s Core Ultra processor family includes acceleration for AI workloads like gaming and video. Now these are processors that are already in-market and in user’s hands. In most cases, as enterprises upgrade their systems, they will likely end up with these newer processors.
Spilling the tea
So, here’s the tea. In the end, there is no such thing as an AI PC. At least not as the discrete product that marketing would suggest. The PC vendors are also not marketing products as a category of AI PCs. In reality, the AI enhancements are coming from the chip manufacturers in the form of their CPU, GPU, NPUs and in-turn benefiting the variety of PC products.
As users upgrade their hardware, they likely will inherit this new capability as part of their next upgrade. However, the applications and services are yet to fully capitalize on the underlying technology. Yet.
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