Question: AI PC Leadership

Hey guys,

I'm ISPed so I don't particularly care, but I decided to take an hour off my job search to watch the earnings call today. I realized Pat keeps saying how Intel is leading in the AI PC category. I was too intimidated to ask anyone at Intel, and I just want to ask now: just what precisely is an AI PC and why should a consumer buy it?

Seems like it is defined as a PC with a copilot button and an NPU. NPUs offer some marginal power efficiency improvements over GPUs on inference tasks, and those benchmarks after a couple reviews seem shaky. Besides, isn't like 99% of the everyman's AI use (GPTs, Perplexity, Claude, DALL-E etc.) cloud-based? Why would I want to do inference tasks on an otherwise low powered laptop? And if I want to run AI workloads seriously, I think just getting a good NVIDIA GPU somewhere i.e. gaming laptop or desktop is what I'd do, not use an NPU.... and I can even do some light training with it to top it off. As for a copilot button...lol. I have one on my MSI raider, and the first thing I did was reconfigured it.

Seems to me that Core Ultra and other AI PC stuff is really just... a scam. I'm not gloating, I'm seriously asking (after all, I did contribute somewhat to let it happen): What's the deal with this?

I still have intel stock, so I care a little. I guess I am excited about Gaudi 3, I know AWS uses Gaudi 2 actively, but like... it's just not going to touch H200. What precisely IS the intel AI strat?

Comment! It's anonymous!

6 replies (most recent on top)

It is a Microsoft invention.
They want to reduce the load on their cloud so they offload some compute to the client.

Yes, a GPU is faster but it will drain your laptop battery much faster than an NPU.

Hope that helps.

https://imgflip.com/i/98lou8

Hey @kwn+1vgLRfQg

No, I agree about the potential privacy risk.
But then, as I mention in my other comment: why not just get a PC with a good GPU?
Because, seriously, a CPU+NPU combo is just too underpowered for someone with a serious AI use case.

Hey OP,
This may come as a shock to normies but not everyone wants to upload their private information to the cloud or pay some woke anti-white company $50/mo to process it.

@khm+1vgLRfQg
Hey, thanks for your reply.
As I mentioned in my post:
> Most AI tasks are done on cloud. Even if you are graphic designer/ pro photo editor, those guys just use Adobe Firefly etc. basically cloud services. Why would I ever host a model on an otherwise super underpowered laptop, let alone infer from it?

One reason could be user privacy. Well: why then would I use a super underpowered laptop with an NPU when I can shell out like 300 bucks more and get a good gaming laptop with a GPU, which if a little power hungry is still so much better than an NPU across all AI tasks?

It's the same piece of sh-t CPU you are used to, just with an NPU on it for optimized inferencing of models locally on your computer. It's just marketing bullsh-t to make it sound like Intel is in the AI race.

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Question: AI PC Leadership

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