Kevin Terwilliger, Vice-President of Product Management at Dell Technologies (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

Terwilliger says he has heard from customers in the IT environment repeatedly that they want a PC with long battery life and performance as good as a Mac, but it has to run on a Windows operating system. “Now, we have a product to put in front of those end users that has 20% better battery life in different situations, and if it’s an M3 MacBook Air, it offers 58% better performance while still keeping them in the Windows ecosystem,” he explains.

The computer industry sees Copilot Plus PCs as representing a new approach with AI systems running on the chip, making them faster, more secure, and private. This opens up the scope for new uses and types of applications and features such as “Recall” on Windows 11, which Microsoft describes as photographic memory for your PC. It is currently available exclusively on Copilot Plus PCs.

The race to integrate artificial intelligence into personal computers is the latest attempt by Microsoft and its partners to gain an upper hand over Apple and its silicon that powers the Mac. This time, however, smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm is at the center of Microsoft’s new Windows on ARM push rather than veteran chip makers Intel or AMD. Qualcomm’s new X Elite and X Plus chips power the first wave of Copilot Plus PCs, such as Dell’s XPS 13.

“Qualcomm has a true PC CPU built for the workload of the PC, not built for the phone. They managed to bring the performance while also maintaining the performance per watt. So now you have the efficiency story, and you have the performance,” he said.

While the industry may be talking about the performance and big battery life gains on AI PCs, but at the heart of the AI PC battle is the NPU – at least, that’s what seems to be. AI PCs typically contain a special neural processing engine, or NPU, which is designed specifically to perform AI tasks, helping to take some of the load off of a system’s CPU and GPU. On Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PCs, the NPU is rated at 45 TOPS or 45 trillion operations per second, with a complete system TOPS of 75. However, Intel’s latest AI-centric chips can only hit 11 TOPS from the dedicated NPU. Meanwhile, Apple’s M3 Neural Engine ships with 18 TOPS of AI performance.

Snapdragon X Elite on the Dell XPS 13 has an NPU that can offer up to 45 TOPs of performance (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

“An NPU, as it’s added, is the first step we talk about in AI. But actually, the first step is moving some of those inefficient workloads over onto the NPU. A couple of great examples that we have seen with ISVs already, like the studio effects from Microsoft, turn off background blur and zoom. It’s less about AI and more about an inferencing workflow. You can move that to the NPU and it brings massive benefits for CPU and power efficiency,” explains Terwilliger.

“For us, an AI PC is more than just an NPU,” he adds. “I think the industry has narrowed it down to saying it has to have an NPU to be an AI PC. I think we’re still pretty early to start putting things in their swim lanes like that.”

Right now, the discussion may be centered on how to bring AI PCs with NPU to the market fastest and run AI systems directly on a computer. However, the transition to AI PCs might take four to five years to reach the goal set by PC brands.

“There are over 1.5 billion PCs today with no NPUs in them. Those aren’t just going to disappear. They are not all going to have NPUs overnight. That’s probably a four to five year transition” he says.

Terwilliger believes the market will see different types of AI PCs that coexist together. Some will have higher NPU performance per watt for laptops, but not all AI PCs will have that level of performance.

“The Copilot Plus is a very specific capability, and there will be certain users who find a lot of value in it, but we don’t necessarily believe that the vast majority of people are going to move to a Copilot Plus PC in the next couple of years,” he says, addressing concerns regarding existing AI PCs that use a chip that also has a dedicated NPU but cannot be qualified as a Copilot Plus PC.

“Eventually, those models are going to be able to run on smaller NPUs. So you have both things. You have the NPU getting bigger, and you have the ISV ecosystem getting more efficient at the same time. We still don’t know what the right inflection point is.”

More tech companies are launching small AI models that are often cheaper to run and perform better on devices like laptops and smartphones. Last month, Microsoft introduced three smaller AI models that are part of its Phi-3 family. The company said the smallest of the three, Phi-3 Mini, is as capable as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot. Other companies also have their smaller AI models; for example, Llama 3 8B from Meta is good for coding assistance.

For Terwilliger, it is the users who need to make a choice of which AI capability fits their needs. It can vary from an average consumer who might have different needs versus a large enterprise that may be more interested in deploying AI PCs to utilise a large language model for specific use cases in their environment.

At the Dell Technologies World 2024 conference, the company introduced its first set of ARM-powered AI PCs (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

As a wave of artificial intelligence comes to the most popular applications and devices and the demand for artificial intelligence tools grows, the competition is only getting fiercer. But as Terwilliger puts it, as the industry enters the age of AI PCs, the shift is not only happening at the hardware level but also in how software is being perceived.

“Copilot and Windows will become synonymous with each other. With Copilot, things are becoming much more prominent, and we see people spending a whole lot more time talking about them. In the past, Windows was just seen as an enabler, and discussions focused more on hardware features,” he says.

Terwilliger says Microsoft is winning with AI storytelling from an operating system perspective. “If you really look at what Apple came out with recently, it was more of a creativity story from an AI perspective, whereas Microsoft is much more holistic in combining creativity and productivity. They have the ability to do that within their productivity suite.”

Terwilliger reminds us that the Copilot Plus PCs powered by Qualcomm chips are just the beginning of the AI PC story moving forward. Intel, which holds 72 per cent of the PC market, also plans to launch Copilot Plus PCs powered by its upcoming Lunar Lake processors in Q3.

“Qualcomm has a great opportunity to gain a durable advantage in the PC market. That said, we certainly see Intel investing in performance per watt and closing that gap. We have Lunar Lake in our labs.” He adds: “We think that competition within the silicon landscape is very beneficial for our end users, but we still believe that the ARM instruction set will continue to be an advantage for Qualcomm.”

The writer is attending Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas at the invitation of Dell India.