PC manufacturers are gatecrashing the artificial intelligence industry party. There are now a number of devices that incorporate AI acceleration hardware
By
Andrew Hewitt
Published: 27 May 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) on the personal computer (PC) was a central focus of the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year. PC and chip manufacturers such as AMD, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel and Nvidia announced AI PC innovations to come in the so-called “year of the AI PC”.
Approximately 50 models of AI PCs are available for purchase today, and multiple AI chips are ready for enterprise deployments. Forrester expects certain roles with high computing needs, such as creatives, data scientists and developers, to benefit substantially from AI PCs.
While employees have run AI on client operating systems (OS) for years – think background blur or noise cancellation – most AI processing still happens through cloud services such as Microsoft Teams.
AI PCs are now disrupting the cloud-only AI model to bring that processing to local devices running any OS. But what is an AI PC exactly? Forrester defines an AI PC as a PC embedded with an AI chip and algorithms specifically designed to improve the experience of AI workloads across the computer processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and neural processing unit (NPU).
Following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the prospect of the AI PC – one that would take advantage of the immense opportunity of generative AI (GenAI) as well as other types of AI – quickly gained attention as leaders sought ways to bring AI to every employee, on every endpoint, across every organisation.
The AI PC has captured the imagination of the industry. Such devices promise to supercharge employee productivity. IT and business leaders foresee many use cases for GenAI, from content creation, to meeting transcription, to code development.
AI PC user benefits
While corporate-approved GenAI applications, such as Microsoft Copilot, often run as cloud services, running them locally enables them to interact with local hardware, such as cameras and microphones, with less latency. There will be opportunities for software developers to use AI chips in PCs to enable new use cases, especially for creatives.
For example, open source music production software company Audacity is working with Intel to deliver AI audio production capabilities for musicians, such as text-to-audio creation, instrument separation and vocal-to-text transcription.
In another example, photo and video enhancement software provider Topaz Labs is now enabling users, via AMD’s Ryzen AI, to run powerful AI video and picture enhancement features on local PCs much faster than they could four years ago on GPU-enabled desktops.
An AI PC also offers a way to improve the collaboration experience. Dedicated AI chipsets will improve the performance of classic collaboration features, such as background blur and noise, by sharing resources acr
