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AI Hardware Technology

CES PC Makers Bet on AI To Rekindle Sales (reuters.com) 15

Posted by msmash from the flavor-of-the-season dept.
PC and microchip companies struggling to get consumers to replace pandemic-era laptops offered a new feature to crowds this week at CES: AI. From a report: PC and chipmakers including AMD and Intel are betting that the so-called "neural processing units" now found in the latest chip designs will encourage consumers to once again pay for higher-end laptops. Adding additional AI capabilities could help take market share from Apple. "The conversations I'm having with customers are about 'how do I get my PC ready for what I think is coming in AI and going to be able to deliver,'" said Sam Burd, Dell Technologies' president of its PC business. Chipmakers built the NPU blocks because they can achieve a high level of performance for AI functions with relatively modest power needs. Today there are few applications that might take full advantage of the new capabilities, but more are coming, said David McAfee, corporate vice president and general manager of the client channel business at AMD.

Among the few applications that can take advantage of such chips is the creative suite of software produced by Adobe. Intel hosted an "open house" where a handful of PC vendors showed off their latest laptops with demos designed to put the new capabilities on display. Machines from the likes of Dell and Lenovo were arrayed inside one of the cavernous ballrooms at the Venetian Convention Center on Las Vegas Boulevard.
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CES PC Makers Bet on AI To Rekindle Sales More

CES PC Makers Bet on AI To Rekindle Sales

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  • Honestly, do we need news articles that "PC manufacturers bet on ${TECH_FAD} to rescue sales because they have been selling warmed-over retread products for a decade" ?

    Why do I need to buy a new PC to use some AI to give me bad answers? I can get bad answers from AI with the equipment I already have.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      You can use it to generate weird pictures too.
      Really weird pictures depending on the model.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Beats taking drugs and messing up your brain for the rest of your life. Now you can have the computer do all the hallucinating for you and if you don't like the results, you can just hit CTRL-Z.

  • I'm sure Amazon would like to Re-Kindle their sales as well.

  • Since the software runs mostly on the GPU all you need is a mediocre system with a good GPU. Good GPUs are mostly not found in laptops, so this is just going to improve used PC values and sell a bunch of video cards with a lot of VRAM.

    • Not necessarily. You CAN run inference workloads on GPUs, but newer mobile SoCs ship with NPUs that speed up the process while using less die space and power than a GPU would to perform the same task. NPUs actually started to show up in phones first, and now they're making their way into x86 mobile SoCs.

      Modern SoCs tend to list their inference power in TOPs (which is really an over-simiplification of SoCs in AI inference tasks) and combine the total inference power of the GPU and NPU. Not all of those re

  • There, fixed that headline for you.
  • I think "AI"is already starting to fizzle out. It is a neat toy, but it is just a toy.
    • It's a sucker bet. They're hoping there's enough suckers out there to believe the hype.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        We've hit the wall on trying to make computers faster, cheaper, and more efficient while maintaining guaranteed accurate results. If only we could get the stupid lemmings to accept randomly incorrect results from time to time while consuming way more electricity and costing a lot more...

  • "The conversations I'm having with customers are about 'how do I get my PC ready for what I think is coming in AI and going to be able to deliver,'" said Sam Burd, Dell Technologies' president of its PC business.

    Who are these customers he's referring to and what specifically do they think AI is going to do? Most AI is running on a server farm in the Cloud and what's sitting on your desk matters little with how you interact with it.

    • The unwritten promise of AI is the glimmer of hope that corporations can fire workers by the masses, replacing low-level knowledge workers with "bots". Customer service, writers, teachers (think corporate trainers), proofreaders, even programmers... if corporate land can dump these jobs it means huge profit potentials. The grift here is that the buzz is way louder than reality. VC backed hucksters are pitching nonsense to non-technical decision-makers and they're believing it.

  • encourage consumers to once again pay for higher-end laptops.

    Because AI?

    Which consumers, do tell?
    The ones you are hoping to hoodwink into the AI hype? - ah yes, those consumers.
    Good luck with that.
    Paying a premium price for a souped up version of Mr. Clippy?

    "Helping your kids to legally plagurise their way through school and university!"

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