Dell, MSI and others love the label, but it’s full of sound and fury
Chances are you’ve received at least a few emails from system builders promoting their new line of AI PCs, and you probably thought this was official branding. Marketing would have you believe it’s similar to Centrino or vPro, labels used by brands to indicate the chip’s capabilities, but the truth is that AI PC is just a marketing term. Robert Hallock confirmed to The Register that since “AI PC does not include specific requirements for memory, storage or I/O speed,” it is not considered an exact specification for the brand.
The AI PC is a system containing a GPU and a processor with a neural processing unit that can process VNNI and Dp4a instructions. AVX-VNNI has been supported by Intel since Alder Lake, and every GPU released in the past few years supports Dp4a. Indeed, only AMD’s Zen 5 chips can properly support AVX-VNNI, which does give Intel some advantages in the AI PC market. As mentioned earlier, if you want to run LLM efficiently, you’ll need a lot of memory and storage bandwidth to manage it, and Intel’s AI PC moniker doesn’t guarantee that.
If you or someone you know is excited about new AI PC lines from different manufacturers, keep this in mind.