Will AI PCs be a new sweet spot for CPUs and DRAMs?

The personal computer (PC) industry is warming up to a new sweet spot: PCs incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Intel and Microsoft—the primary beneficiaries of the PC revolution—are now pushing PCs with AI-enabled CPUs and AI-powered software assistants, respectively, to move AI applications from the cloud to the PC realm.

In other words, AI PCs embedded with specialized chips can run AI models locally without relying on the cloud. That, according to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, will make AI services cheaper, faster, and more private than using services based in cloud-centric data centers. “You’re unleashing this power for every person, every use case, every location in the future,” he said at the CES 2024 in Las Vegas.

Intel, while competing with AI powerhouse Nvidia in server space, clearly sees an opportunity to catch up in its forte: PC processors. What it’s doing right now is integrating neural processor units (NPUs) into PC processors; NPUs are specialized semiconductors dedicated to handling AI tasks.

Intel’s Meteor Lake laptop CPU has incorporated an NPU to support third-party AI software features. Its archrival in the PC hardware space, AMD, has also been shipping AI PC processors. Next, Nvidia showcased three new GPUs—RTX 4060 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4080 Super—for AI-ready laptops at a virtual event before CES 2024.

Figure 1 Meteor Lake CPU has incorporated an NPU to support AI applications. Source: Intel

Besides AI-ready processors, memory chipmakers like Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix are also eyeing AI PCs to enable AI accelerators to run powerful assistants on personal computers. New laptops currently come with as much as 8 MB of RAM, and it’s likely to double in Windows-based AI PCs. In fact, a large language model (LLM) running an AI assistant could require more than 16 MB of memory.

Take the example of the Llama 2 family of AI models created by Meta, which requires nearly 30 GB of RAM for its modest variant. Moreover, the amount of memory in AI PCs will likely increase with the availability of more powerful AI accelerators and processors.

Figure 2 Copilot AI assistant is built around OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Source: Microsoft

At the moment, consumers are only warming up to AI personal computers, and it’ll take a while before more native applications are made available for AI PCs. However, both hardware and software for AI PCs will become more powerful over time, and that’s good news for semiconductor devices like CPUs, GPUs, and DRAMs.

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The post Will AI PCs be a new sweet spot for CPUs and DRAMs? appeared first on EDN.

Will AI PCs be a new sweet spot for CPUs and DRAMs?

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