During the dark days of the pandemic, computer makers couldn’t believe their luck. With billions of people plunged into lockdown, many of them were ordering new computers so they could work from home.
Schools bought devices en masse to send home with kids to continue lessons remotely. It was boom time for computer makers like Apple, HP and Dell. Then the hangover hit. Since the splurge of pandemic spending on computers, the last couple of years have been lean ones for the industry. Local sales of PCs dropped 11% last year.
But the PC format hadn’t fundamentally gone anywhere in the past decade anyway, other than getting faster and slimmer. Cue the artificial intelligence revolution and an opportunity to breathe new life into the staid hardware market. The next computer you buy will be an AI PC. You’ll see them in stores from next month, comparably priced to existing mid- to high-end PCs.
The difference is that in addition to the central processing unit (CPU) that does all your regular computing tasks, and the graphics processing unit (GPU) that displays video and renders games on your screen, the chipset running your PC will also feature a neural processing unit (NPU).
This additional feature is designed to handle AI-intensive applications, and machine learning workloads that we’ve typically been sending to cloud computing platforms for processing by ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini AI chatbot.
By doing these calculations on your PC instead, the processing is much faster and the AI can learn exactly what you are doing on your computer, to instinctively know what you need.
A stark vision of what’s to come was unveiled last week with the debut of Microsoft’s AI PCs, called Copilot+ PCs. Microsoft’s Surface laptops, and third-party Windows devices from the likes of Acer, Asus, and Lenovo, are set to offer a new AI-powered feature called Recall. It’s a sort of photographic memory that records everything you do on your computer, including all your activity in apps, every meeting you logged into, and every website you’ve browsed.
It then creates a timeline allowing you to find everything you’ve ever looked at, and the AI sorts through and makes sense of it all.
That is hugely valuable, but also a bit alarming and has privacy advocates up in arms. Microsoft claims the new wave of AI PCs can do this securely while preserving your privacy, because the data never leaves your PC, and is instead stored in encrypted memory, accessible only when you are logged in.
The NPUs coming to these computers will power AI functions in Microsoft’s Copilot features, but also third-party apps that run on your computer. That will free up your CPU to take care of more mundane tasks, so the performance of your next computer will get a boost.
We are moving into the era of edge computing, where computer chips designed for AI do the processing on your laptop or phone, rather than sending data to a distant computer server. Microsoft has set a performance benchmark for NPUs to perform 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) to adequately run its Copilot features.
AI is driving a race to improve hardware performance in a way we haven’t seen in years. The big benefit for PC users will be in AI understanding exactly what you need based on your computing behaviour.
For those of us who basically just use our computer to run web-based applications in the Chrome browser, that stands to make the PC genuinely useful again.
