What Is an AI PC?

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Let's not start this trip on overinflated tires: Neither PCMag as a whole, nor this writer, will tell you that AI is a glorious godsend that will radically improve your life right now. Instead, it's a technology shimmering with potential, and a decade from now, it will likely be baked into everything we do, in unrecognizable forms and ways we haven't yet imagined. For now, though, it's better at helping you do things than at outright doing things for you.

Still, we can hardly blame you for being interested in AI. Massive hype and news coverage have made it the top trending pair of initials, with a particular focus on a new breed of computer called an "AI PC"—Intel has certainly hyped that term alongside its first-generation "Meteor Lake" processors equipped with neural engines. And the AI PC has gotten further exposure in what Microsoft calls the "Copilot+ PC," its own spin on the concept. Chromebooks and Macs are getting in on the AI action, too. (We'll look at them in a minute.) Let's take a snapshot of the state of laptop and desktop artificial intelligence as of today.

What's a Copilot+ PC? New Hardware for a New Ad Campaign

AI is the buzzword of the year because operating system colossus Microsoft has twisted laptop makers' arms to add a trigger button for its Copilot AI assistant to their keyboards, and convinced most of the key laptop vendors to introduce what it dubs Copilot+ PCs. These are systems with neural processing units (NPUs) strong enough to handle artificial intelligence tasks like real-time translation and image generation locally, instead of outsourcing them to cloud servers.

Until recently, the very latest Intel and AMD processors had modest NPUs built in that were not capable of the 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS, another hot new acronym) the Copilot+ PC spec requires. So while we wait for Intel's next laptop chip release, the Core Ultra 2 series or "Lunar Lake," the first wave of Copilot+ laptops swap the long-dominant x86 architecture for Arm processors. Specifically, they use chips from Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus lines, which incorporate an NPU named "Hexagon."

The Hexagon NPU delivers 45 TOPS of power, compared to roughly 12 and 16 TOPS for those of Intel's "Meteor Lake" Core Ultra and AMD's Ryzen 8000 series (its first NPU-equipped family), respectively. AMD's new Ryzen AI 300 series chips, just out this summer and dubbed "Strix Point," feature an NPU capable of 50 TOPS, edging the 48 TOPS of Intel's coming "Lunar Lake" silicon. Microsoft has noted that it will make Copilot+ features available for users of these latest-gen NPU-enabled AMD and Intel processors in November. (They'll arrive via Windows Update.)

For the record, all these neural processing units are 98-pound weaklings compared to the Nvidia silicon that's mostly powering the AI craze. Nvidia's data-center AI chips like the H100 and H200 power generative AI and have made Nvidia an absolute mint. And on the desktop, the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is capable of 1,300 TOPS.

The initial launch of Copilot+ PCs on Qualcomm chips is significant because the history of Windows on Arm is checkered, with historically slower performance than Windows on x86. (Indeed, it couldn't have gotten off to a worse start than it did in 2012, with a Microsoft Surface tablet that no one bought, running a Windows variant called Windows RT that had no software.)

But newly optimized versions of the OS, the über-dominant Microsoft 365 office suite, and popular programs from Adobe and other software vendors have closed the gap. Non-optimized x86 apps run on the new PCs via an emulation layer called Prism, which actually works pretty well, though your mileage—or rather, your specific or specialized application—may vary.

So, What Can a Copilot+ PC Do?

Microsoft's May 20, 2024, launch touted Copilot+ PCs as "the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever," with all-day battery life—well, up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of video playback on a charge—and built-in encryption for enhanced security. It also singled out several new tricks for the old dog that is Windows.

One, Studio Effects for the Windows Camera app, predates the Copilot+ launch. It boosts your laptop's webcam with new videoconferencing effects processed on an NPU, including automatic framing; portrait lighting to even out overly bright or dark room environments; a bit of CGI rendering to give the illusion of maintaining eye contact even when you don't; and a quasi-green-screen option to blur your background or replace it with an image of your choice.

Live Captions is a feature that detects foreign-language audio in a video call or app and provides instantaneous, automatic English captions visible by all participants in a conference call. It works with both live and prerecorded sound and can translate from 44 different languages.

Other tools enhance Windows' Photos and Paint apps with the ability to generate or apply effects to images on your PC, without waiting for other traffic on Microsoft Designer's Dall-E 3 servers (though it does require Internet access and a Microsoft account). Cocreator and Image Creator let you produce images from text prompts or requests. Restyle Image lets you change what you've generated. ("Let me see it as an oil painting" or "Make it steampunk.")

One of Microsoft's proudest announcements on May 20, Recall, takes a snapshot of your screen every few seconds, saving the shots to your laptop's solid-state drive as an encrypted timeline that you can scroll through or search to make it easier to get back to content you were viewing, or a document you were working in.

However, users and reporters instantly reacted not as if Recall was the Lady of the Lake handing them Excalibur, but a boss installing a keystroke logger to snoop on employees ogling porn or applying for another job while at work. Microsoft backtracked on Recall so fast it left skid marks, first making Recall opt-in instead of inescapable, then postponing the introduction of the feature altogether. (The latest: It should appear as a beta release to Windows Insiders in October.)

Meanwhile, Google and Apple...

Eight days after Microsoft's Copilot+ PC kickoff, Google announced new AI features for its Chromebook Plus platform. Help Me Write brings suggestions and shortcuts like Rephrase, Elaborate, Formalize, and Shorten to word processing, web apps, or PDF forms. Generative AI lets you dream up your own Chromebook wallpapers and videoconferencing backgrounds. The Google Photos app gains a Magic Editor button for repositioning or resizing objects in images or tweaking the lighting and background.

The Chromebook Plus home screen now includes Google's AI assistant Gemini. New Chromebook Plus buyers get 12 free months of the Google One AI Premium plan, which combines 2TB of cloud storage with Gemini help in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Gmail, as well as access to Gemini Advanced.

As for recent MacBooks, iMacs, iPads, and iPhones, there's Apple Intelligence, which the company calls "AI for the rest of us." Coming in beta-test form this fall, it will "draw on your personal context while setting a new standard for privacy in AI."

First Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs We've Tested

Apple Intelligence supercharges the Siri assistant with richer language understanding, the ability to type as well as speak queries, and awareness of what's on screen—for instance, Apple says, handling "Add this address to her contact card" when Mary sends you an updated address. (Siri will also appear as a snazzy glowing light around the edges of the iPhone display.)

Apple promises that new Writing Tools will proofread your text, polish different versions of it (e.g., more businesslike or casual), and summarize and draft responses to emails. Both Siri and Writing Tools will incorporate OpenAI's ChatGPT, with no subscription needed for access (but paid features available). There'll be image-creation tools and custom Genmoji; Image Wand to turn a rough sketch into a pretty picture in the Notes app; and an Image Playground app to let you try out illustration and animation.

Don't Fall for Hype, But Don't Turn Down Help

The AI landscape is young and unformed, or at most just beginning its Wild West phase. While assistive AI—making summaries of lengthy documents or emails, or helping turn a Word document into a PowerPoint deck—is showing real potential, generative AI is proving to be part sizzle, part steak, and all sorts of enmeshed in ethical and accuracy concerns.

Unfortunately, most media coverage of AI has been closer to breathless hype than the bubble-bursting of critics like Ed Zitron, who recently wrote "Generative AI was always unsustainable, always dependent on reams of training data that necessitated stealing from millions of people … These men have burned hundreds of billions of dollars on a machine that boils lakes to make the most mediocre version of the past...the loudest people in tech trying to convince people that a Large Language Model that can generate text and images that kind of suck is tantamount to the launch of the iPhone." Our own view, you won't be surprised to learn, is somewhere in between.

PCMag will do its utmost to bring you both the good and bad of artificial intelligence and hands-on reviews of every AI PC. Right now, rolling into the fall of 2024, you're not missing much if you're not yet on the bandwagon, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't keep an eye on the field.