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Microsoft’s first AI PCs are the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 for businesses
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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What exactly is an “AI PC”? What makes it better than a non-AI PC? Is this a product that consumers are asking for?
Exactly... It's just marketing hype garbage
Like the article states: it contains an NPU. It's also not targeted at consumers.
I suppose a better way to phrase it is- why is an NPU necessary? What does it enable these machines to do that a Surface sans NPU can’t?
And yes, these are business-oriented. But my question remains the same - is built-in AI a feature that businesses, as consumers of this product, are asking for? And presumably this is just the beginning, and future personal devices from Microsoft will have NPUs too. I haven’t heard any clamoring for that, but I could very well also just not be noticing the people that are
MS is making a strong push in AI business, e.g. I was told their salespeople are highly incentivized to sell copilot products, and not much else. At a big company that is strategic partner & key account (etc.) for MS, we are looking at MS Dynamics implementation for CRM, and they barely answered our emails, while on a copilot related project they are throwing people at us.
They are betting they can make a lot of money from it if they capture and monetize the corporate AI market early (whatever that might actually be), the demand / customer need is definitely not high currently.
It can basically handle neural network/AI tasks more efficiently than a regular CPU/GPU can.
Yes, deserved or not, AI is currently on everyone's mind in the business world. Working as a software dev, every client these days asks if we "do AI", so we pretty much have to reluctantly learn and use it. And many of those clients are very protective of their data and don't just want to put them on some web service, like OpenAI. So there's certainly demand for locally running AI tasks.
It can run leela chess zero faster, for example (if it's implemented)
It means it's only one generation behind Apple in ML performance instead of two or three.
Serious answer: it means it has intel's latest generation of laptop chips with better ML acceleration, and — better sit down for this cuz it'll blow your mind — a Copilot key on the keyboard, which nobody outside of Microsoft's branding department ever asked for.
I'll be interested to see the benchmarks. Intel should be tripping over themselves to catch up.
The "AI PC" specification requires a minimum of 40TOPs of AI compute which is over double the 18TOPs in the current M3s. Direct comparison doesn't really work though.
What really matters is how it's made available for development. The Neural engine is basically a black box. It can't be incorporated into any low level projects because it's only made available through a high-level swift api. Intel by comparison seems to be targeting pytorch acceleration with their libraries.
I wouldn't have had room for a Super or Hyper modifier key in Linux without Microsoft getting the Windows key added to keyboards, so...