Let’s be honest – we’re all getting sick of seeing AI plastered over every tech product. A trend that will not be slowing down any time soon. A recent victim of this trend is the PC market, as AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm have been talking about AI PCs for the last year or so. Microsoft will be hosting an event on March 21st that is titled The New Era of Work. AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm will have dueling keynotes for their respective CEOs at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan.
This begs the question: should I wait for these new processors in the second half of the year or is Microsoft even the final arbiter of what makes an AI PC? AMD and Intel are showing some early examples of the capabilities of their platforms shipping today. Qualcomm has had an NPU in its Snapdragon processors for PCs since the Snapdragon 850 in 2018.
The argument for running AI inference workloads on dedicated NPUs is that it is the most power efficient way to run AI workloads without killing the notebook’s battery life and notebooks outsell desktop PCs, especially for businesses.Microsoft is expected to make the push to support its AI CoPilot on client PCs, not just as a cloud service. CoPilot can change the way people use PCs and can boost productivity.