The AI PC Revolution: Challenges and Opportunities in 2025

Where does Microsoft's NPU obsession leave Nvidia?

While Microsoft pushes AI PC experiences, Nvidia is busy wooing developers Comment Nvidia is the uncontested champion of AI infrastructure -- at least in the datacenter. In the emerging field of AI PCs, things aren't so clear cut. In early 2024, it became plain that, for better or worse, the future of Windows would be imbued with AI-augmented features and experiences. Headline features included live captions and translation, image generation in MS Paint, and, eventually, the somewhat dubious Recall feature that captures periodic screenshots and uses them to keep track of past activity. For the moment, these new features are exclusive to so-called Copilot+ PCs, but in order to qualify for that designation, the computers have to meet Microsoft's minimum performance targets. According to the Windows titan's documentation, Copilot+ PCs require a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 40 or more TOPS, or 40-plus trillion INT8 AI operations per second, along with at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. When this all launched, only Qualcomm had a processor capable of meeting Redmond's NPU requirement, and so only PCs with that silicon were allowed as Copilot+ PCs to run the aforementioned AI-augmented features. Since then, Qualcomm's qualifying Arm-compatible X chips were joined by Intel's Lunar Lake and AMD's Strix Point and Halo processor families as Copilot+ PC compliant. Yet, somehow, a $2,000 Nvidia RTX 5090, as announced at CES 2025 this month, with more than 3.3 petaFLOPS of AI compute (that's at FP4 by the way) still isn't good enough for Redmond. No matter how many FLOPS or TOPS your GPU can muster, it only matters to Microsoft if it's an NPU churning them out -- for now anyway. Much of the marketing hype around AI PCs has revolved around Microsoft's Copilot+ spec and understandably so. Nearly every PC sold today runs Windows. This dominance of the PC software ecosystem makes Microsoft's obsession with NPUs hard to ignore, but, that doesn't mean Nvidia has been resting on its laurels, content with lording it over the datacenter, workstation graphics, and discrete gaming GPUs. In fact, Nvidia has been working to bring AI features to the PC for years, Jesse Clayton, who leads product marketing for Windows AI at Nvidia, told The Register. "We kind of started the movement with AI on the PC back in 2018 when we launched the first GeForce GPUs and Nvidia GPUs with dedicated AI hardware -- our tensor cores," Clayton said. "Along with that, we announced the first widely deployed PC AI, which was DLSS, which is used in games to accelerate frame rates by using AI to generate pixels and now generating frames for the games." Since then the GPU giant has rolled out the RTX AI Toolkit, a suite of tools and software for optimizing and deploying genAI models on Windows PCs, brought Nvidia Inference Microservices (NIMs) to PCs, and rolled out a number of blueprints for things like state-of-the-art image generation, and converting PDFs to podcasts. "Our strategy is where we can deliver interesting and differentiated experiences, either as a gamer because it enhances your gameplay, or as a creator because it saves you time and reduces the repetitive, tedious work," Clayton explained. And, while some of these experiences are aimed directly at end users -- ChatRTX and RTX Voice, for example -- many of Nvidia's more recent software launches have been aimed at the developer community. Say what you will about Copilot+'s actual value, Microsoft has successfully forced chipset designers to offer some form of NPU that satisfies the Windows giant while also setting a new minimum standard for machine-learning performance. Considering Windows' market share and Microsoft's ongoing efforts to shoehorn AI into every corner of its software, it's only a matter of time before NPUs trickle down to even the lowliest of budget builds. What's more, adoption of frameworks such as Microsoft's DirectML and ONNX Runtime have helped to simplify application development and allow code to run across a diverse set of hardware with minimal retooling. This poses a potential problem for Nvidia. The Silicon Valley goliath may dominate the discrete graphics processor market, surrounded by its CUDA moat, yet its GPUs are only found in about 18 percent of PCs sold with the vast majority of systems using integrated graphics from Intel, AMD, or others. The case can be made that, before too long, NPUs will become a much larger target for developers building AI apps. And while Nvidia won't necessarily be left out of the conversation as its accelerators also support many of the more popular software frameworks, at least some of its competitive edge revolves around convincing developers to use its libraries and microservices, which promise easier integration and higher performance and efficiency. Ultimately, Clayton says, developers will have to make a decision on whether they want to bring their app to market quickly using something like NIMs or if they want to support the largest possible install base. But, while Nvidia may face competition from NPUs eventually -- AI PCs are still a pretty niche market -- it isn't necessarily all bad news. Even if models don't end up running on Nvidia's PC hardware, it's highly likely they were trained on its GPUs. Even then, Clayton makes the case that NPUs won't be appropriate for every workload. Forty TOPS is a decent amount of compute, but, as we mentioned earlier, it pales in comparison to the performance of high-end graphics silicon. "NPUs are going to be where you can run your lightweight AI workloads, and they're going to be really power efficient," he said. "A GPU is where you run your more demanding AI use cases, and that's where we've been pushing and focusing our efforts." "For stuff that simply doesn't fit on a PC, you run those on GPUs in the cloud, where you have effectively unlimited performance," Clayton added. There's already some evidence to suggest that Microsoft may extend some Copilot+ functionality to GPUs to support more computationally challenging workloads in the future. Microsoft didn't address our questions regarding its plans to harness GPUs. However, in an anouncement from June, Nvidia said it was working with Microsoft to add GPU acceleration for small language models (SLMs) via the Windows Copilot Runtime. The tech was supposed to materialize by the end of 2024, though Microsoft's own docs -- last updated December 5 -- make no mention of GPUs and specifically cite NPUs as a requirement for its as-yet unavailable Phi Silica project for SLMs. Clayton declined to provide any updates on the collaboration, saying that "ultimately, it's Microsoft's decision for where they're going to run which workloads." If and when Microsoft chooses to embrace GPUs for local AI may ultimately come down to hardware availability. As of writing, the number of NPU-toting Copilot+ PCs with dedicated graphics is rather small. On the desktop, the situation is even trickier. Desktop chips with NPUs do exist, but none of them -- at least to our knowledge -- meet Microsoft's 40 TOPS performance requirement. We don't expect it'll be long before beefier NPUs make their way into desktop silicon. All it would take is Intel or AMD finding a way to cram the NPUs from their mobile chips into a desktop form factor. ®

Why CES's Big Chip Announcements Could Make for a Confusing 2025 for PC Buyers

Last week's CES included the introduction of a variety of new processors for running desktops and notebooks, including new CPUs and graphics solutions. But in looking over the announcements from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, what stands out to me is just how potentially confusing 2025 could be for buyers of such systems. It looks like we're all going to have to make some tradeoffs between raw performance (particularly for graphics), power consumption, and AI capabilities. While just about every new system now will come with a Copilot key, not all will really be suited for running local AI features, such as those in Microsoft's Copilot+ PC program. It seems like we're in a transitional phase, and I won't be surprised if the 2026 offerings all offer at least the minimum 40 TOPS neural processing unit (NPU) that Microsoft is requiring for Copilot+ status. But for now, that's still lacking in the most powerful chips. As usual, every vendor shared benchmarks that showed how much faster their new entrants are compared to previous offerings and particularly competitors. And as always, I suggest taking these with a grain of salt; of course vendors show the benchmarks where they look good. At first glance, it appears that Intel may have some advantage in single-threaded performance while AMD has some in multi-threaded performance. But again, we won't really know until real machines get tested. And Qualcomm talks about how much better its performance is when running on battery power as opposed to being plugged in (which is how most people run performance benchmarks). Intel Pushes Lunar Lake vPro for Commercial, Arrow Lake for Performance No company better shows how incomplete the transition is than Intel. Its well-received Lunar Lake chips, which came to market late last year targeting premium thin and light laptops, are more power-efficient than previous generations with better graphics. Most notably, they include an NPU that can run at up to 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS), enabling what Intel has called "AI PCs," and more importantly what Microsoft has called "Copilot+ PCs." These have up to four performance cores and four efficient cores, and require 10 to 30 watts of power. These are now being sold as the Core Ultra 200V series. At CES, the company unveiled the vPro versions of these chips, meaning that they have features used by large enterprises for things like management of a fleet of laptops. "A great AI PC starts with a great PC," said Jim Johnson, SVP of Intel's Client Computing Group, noting that this includes performance, battery life, and especially compatibility. "Everything must just run," he added, clearly taking a swipe at Snapdragon-based PCs. Johnson talked about how vPro's out-of-band management can help in dealing with things like the recent CrowdStrike outage by deploying fixes before Windows boots. I was pleasantly surprised to see the company has made the first major update to vPro in many years, adding features such as support for Microsoft's Pluton encryption and cloud-based fleet management, which looks much easier to implement than the older system that relies on on-premise servers. All this sounds like a big win for enterprise management of laptops with AI features. However, Intel also introduced new chips in the Arrow Lake family. These are heftier chips with the Arrow Lake H family aimed at thin and light laptops with 28 to 45 watts of power draw, with 16 CPU cores (six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and two low-power efficiency ones) at a maximum speed of up to 5.4GHz, eight graphics cores, and an NPU that tops out at 13 TOPS, due early this quarter The Arrow Lake HX family is for larger laptops requiring 55 watts of power or more but including up to 24 cores (eight performance cores plus 16 efficiency cores), with a top speed of up to 5.5GHz, but with only four graphics cores, reflecting that it is designed for systems with discrete graphics. This also has the 13 TOPS NPU and is due out toward the end of the quarter. The Arrow Lake chips will be marketed as the Core Ultra 200H and 200HX families. Intel also has the Core Ultra 200S series, which are Arrow Lake processors designed for desktops; and the Core Ultra 200U series, which is a lower-power Arrow Lake variant aimed at less expensive and less performant notebooks. Thus the letter designation becomes more important. The H and HX systems should offer somewhat better performance and better graphics, but only the V systems have the ability to run the "Copilot+ PC" applications. Looking forward, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, CEO of Intel Product and interim co-CEO of Intel, showed off the company's forthcoming "Panther Lake" chip based on its 18A process, which the company has said will be when it catches up to rival TSMC. Holthaus said the chip is running and Intel has already provided samples to its big customers; it's on track to launch in the second half of the year. It's an ambitious roadmap, but I can see where all the choices could be quite confusing. AMD Broadens Mobile Line With Gaming and Commercial Choices In contrast, AMD -- while introducing a wide variety of chips for laptop machines -- seems to be largely focused on a single architecture centered around its "Zen 5" cores. AMD's current high-end entrant in the mobile PC market is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 300 family, known as "Strix Point," which also came out in the second half of last year, and I've already tested in some machines. This has 12 cores -- four of the full-performance Zen 5 cores and eight lower-power, lower-performance cores -- all able to run two threads for a total of 24 threads. These have a base frequency of 2GHz with a 5.1GHz turbo, Radeon 890M graphics with 16 compute units; and the XDNA 2 NPU with 50 TOPS, made on TSMC's 4nm process. At this year's show, Rahul Tikoo, SVP and GM of AMD's Client Business Unit, announced a variety of new chips to expand the family. These include the "Krackan Point" family of Ryzen AI 7 and 5 chips, led by the AI 5 340 and 350 processors, with eight cores/16 threads or six cores/12 threads, and a 50 TOPS NPU, designed for 15-to 54-watt systems. These should be out this quarter. Above this will be the "Strix Halo" family, now called Ryzen AI Max. This is available with up to 16 Zen 5 cores with 32 threads, up to 40 RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units, and up to 50 TOPs NPU, but with a new memory bandwidth that takes it up to 256GB/s, requiring 45 to 120 watts of power. These are designed for mobile workstations and high-end gaming laptops and looks like it will power some of the highest performing laptops in the market. I was particularly interested in AMD doing a big push for its commercial line, with versions of the Ryzen AI 5, AI 7, and AI Max processors coming in the second quarter with Ryzen AI Pro and AI Max Pro designations. Tikoo told me AMD is putting more of a focus on this, saying its "Pro" features match vPro for security and manageability, and it too now supports Microsoft's Pluton encryption. These should be out in the second quarter. Perhaps most importantly, Tikoo was joined on stage by Dell's Sam Bird, who announced that Ryzen AI Pro would now be part of Dell's commercial offerings for the first time. (AMD and Lenovo representatives also appeared via video; the three companies -- which together constitute the bulk of the enterprise PC market now all support AMD, Intel, and to a lesser extent, Qualcomm.) All this is designed to make Ryzen Pro a stronger competitor to Intel's vPro. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD announced its Ryzen and Ryzen Pro 200 series, with four core/eight thread, six core/12 thread, and eight core/16 thread options, designed for lower price points and requiring less power, but with only a 16 TOPS NPU (thus making it ineligible for use in Copilot+ PCs, which require 40 TOPS). These will be available in the second quarter. For the highest-end gamers, AMD announced its "Fire Range" HX3D mobile processors, although these are only promised for later in the first half of the year. The top end here is the Ryzen 9 9955HX with 16 of the company's "Zen 5" CPU cores, 32 threads; they can run at up to 5.4GHz max boost, with up to 144MB of cache, and uses 54 watts of TDP. Effectively, this is a mobile version of a desktop chip, again without the more powerful NPU. For desktops, AMD introduced its top-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D chip aimed at gamers and content creators. This has 16 of the company's "Zen 5" CPU cores, 32 threads, can run at up to 5.7 GHz, and with up to 144 MB of cache, and uses 170 watts of TDP. This looks quite powerful and will likely be paired with a discrete graphics card. This will be available in the first quarter. Speaking about discrete graphics, AMD sort of announced its forthcoming RDNA 4 architecture and upcoming new Radeon RX 9070 graphics. Some details were included in press briefings, and I saw several machines that will have this, but AMD chose not to formally announce it at its press conference, saying it didn't have enough time to discuss the details. I expect we'll hear more about that in the next couple of months. Qualcomm Expands Snapdragon Line for Laptops Qualcomm, whose chips powered the initial Copilot+ PCs, broadened its line by introducing the Snapdragon X processor, joining the initial Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus in its lineup for Windows laptops. The X Elite has 12 of the company's Oryon CPU cores running at 3.4 to 3.8GHz with a boost up to 4.3GHz; and the X Plus has eight or 10 cores, running at 3.2 to 3.4GHz with a boost up to 4.0GHz. In comparison, the plain X has eight cores running at 3.0GHz with no boost. It also has a less powerful Adreno GPU, but the same 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, making it eligible for Copilot+ PC applications. That's important because it means this should power the least expensive Copilot+ laptops, down to about a $600 price point. And Qualcomm continues to talk about how it offers the best performance per watt, discussing how many applications run faster on its machines than on Intel-based machines when running on battery power. My experience is that earlier Snapdragon-based Copilot+ PCs showed competitive performance with Intel and AMD machines on applications that have native ARM-architecture versions, such as the Microsoft Office suite, but there are still a number of enterprise applications and games that don't work properly. So, it's an option for some businesses, but not all, at least not yet. Nvidia's Blackwell Pushes Desktop Mobile GPU Performance And then there was Nvidia, which riding high on its successes with AI chips in the datacenter and in discrete graphics, introduced its GeForce RTX 50 series for both desktops and notebooks, both based on the company's "Blackwell" design. The introduction came as part of a larger keynote by CEO Jensen Huang, in which he also gave a vision for how GPU-enabled AI was transforming all sorts of industries. On the desktop side, the high end is the RTX 5090 with 21,760 CUDA cores, 32GB of GDDR7 memory and a 512-bit wide memory interface, with the board itself requiring 575 watts of power and designed for systems with a 1,000-watt power supply. Nvidia's announcement said the board was capable of 3,352 TOPS and in his keynote, Huang said it could do up to 4,000 AI TOPs, three times that of the previous generation. These boards will have a list price of $1,999 and my guess is they will primarily be used by developers of AI applications. More mainstream are the RTX 5080 with 10,752 cores at 2.3GHz and a 256-bit memory interface at $999, the RTX 5070Ti at $749 and RTX 5070 at $549. Huang said they'll be as fast as the company's previous high-end RTX 4090, which has a list price of $1,599, so delivering a lot more performance for the price than the previous generation. The first of these will be available at the end of the month, with the others slated to launch in February. The RTX 50 series will also be available in laptops, including the top-end RTX 5070, which will be in systems starting at $1,299. Again, in the keynote, Huang said it would offer the performance of a 4090 but with half the power. Indeed, many vendors showed gaming laptops with the RTX 50 series in it, including all the high-end gaming laptops I saw announced at the show. (AMD, which historically has been a competitor for mobile discrete graphics seems to be focusing on data center and entry-to-mid-range GPUs right now.) In the keynote, Huang talked about how agentic AI is coming to the PC and other devices and talked about making Windows a "world-class AI PC." He also announced a variety of new AI foundation models called Nemotron. But Huang's biggest focus was on bringing AI to the physical world through the combination of a new "world foundation model" called Cosmos and its Omniverse software for mapping the physical world for things like digital twins. He said this would impact everything from agents and warehouse automation to self-driving cars to humanoid robotics. It was a very expansive vision, with Huang saying the "ChatGPT moment of general robotics is just around the corner." In the meantime, he announced a small desktop "AI supercomputer" called Digits designed to work like a cloud instance of the company's DGX AI training systems for AI developers.

4 things you need to know about AMD and Nvidia from this year's CES

If you somehow missed it, CES 2025 happened earlier this month and it was a blast for PC hardware announcements. AMD outed a bunch of new processors, as did Intel, and Nvidia announced the new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards. We've covered each announcement here at XDA, but if you'd like an easily digestible roundup of what AMD and Nvidia announced, I've got you covered with the heavy-hitting news right here. 4 AMD is still king of desktop CPUs Close If you want to buy one of the best desktop-class processors, AMD is the only choice right now. Intel is still getting its bearings after years of stagnation and difficulties with its process node development. This led the company to outsource parts of its latest Core Ultra 200 series chips to rival fab TSMC. Things will hopefully look up for the company in 2025, especially with Lunar Lake mobile processors performing well. For the desktop, AMD looks like the better choice in the immediate future. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D has just been announced and should become the new best gaming CPU. Intel used CES 2025 to launch more laptop processors using the Arrow Lake architecture. These are notably faster than Lunar Lake chips and should provide more performance in a compact form factor. We look forward to testing the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX with its 24 cores and 5.5 GHz boost speed. Intel's GPU division has been working wonders and we'll also see some new integrated graphics on these mobile chips, adding additional headroom for gaming and creative tasks. While Intel isn't quite down and out in the CPU game, AMD looked in a strong position at CES for the new year. Related AMD just announced the best CPU for gamers Say hello to the mightiest processor for gaming and creating content. Posts 5 Related New Arrow Lake Intel Core Ultra mobile processors land with up to 24 cores The next generation of Intel mobile processors has finally arrived. Posts 3 Nvidia RTX 50 relies on DLSS Close The GeForce RTX 50 series is an upgrade of sorts, at least according to released data, but Nvidia's bold claims with these new GPUs heavily rely on DLSS and other AI-driven features. The company pushed AI hard during its presentation, even going so far as to bring up a virtual Nvidia on stage, which was nothing more than a virtual environment. It was slightly strange, but AI is always bordering on the line of uncanny, something Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has discussed in the past. The big Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 news was the new 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070 GPUs. Starting from $549 for the RTX 5070, Nvidia promised RTX 4090 levels of performance for this mid-range GPU. That's quite the promise and one that's not grounded in raw performance. Instead, Nvidia is leveraging advancements made to its AI cores and software, namely DLSS 4. All the new tech combined offers notable improvements over the prior generation without bumping power and price, something that would please many gamers if the RTX 40 series wasn't already priced out of reach. Here's how the new stack lines up: Price CUDA Cores TFLOPS GDDR7 Power Req Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 $1,999 21,760 318 32GB 575W Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 $999 10,752 171 16GB 360W Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti $749 8,960 133 16GB 300W Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 $549 6,144 94 12GB 250W Will you be buying one of Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 50 series cards? Or will you wait to see what AMD has to offer with RDNA 4? Intel is also clawing at the heels of both brands with its impressive Arc B-series launch. Related Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 series promises RTX 4090 performance for $549 It's like an RTX 4090 only much more powerful and with considerably more RAM. Posts 6 Related 5 reasons DLSS and FSR are game-changers for budget gaming PCs Budget gaming PCs deal with aa ton of constraints. DLSS and FSR help ease the load Posts 2 2 Intel is bringing the big cards Close While AMD and Nvidia attempt to battle it out with some incredible GPU pricing structures, Intel has been having a blast on its own in the lower end of the market. And by the lower end, I'm talking 1440p gaming. The Intel Arc B580 was a pleasant surprise from Intel, especially following the lackluster Arrow Lake launch on the desktop. The Arc B580 has everything going for it. The price is just $249, the GPU boasts some AI and RT chips for enhanced visuals and performance, and Intel has matured its driver support to cover more games than the previous A-series. But the company wasn't finished as it also launched the B570, which costs just $219. It's slightly cheaper and less capable than the B580 (and is often overshadowed by it), but manages to pack some punch for heavier games at 1080p and 1440p. The latter resolution is fine for this GPU as long as you don't max out all visual settings and hope for the best. With both of these graphics cards available in the market, Intel has carved itself a solid slice of the pie. Gamers are always looking to save money when it comes to the GPU and Intel is most certainly offering precisely that. Related Intel Arc B580 review: Intel desperately needed this to go well This is the first GPU I'm excited about in years Posts Related Intel Arc B570 review: $219 gets you butter-smooth high-quality 1440p gaming Yet another brilliant Intel Arc GPU for 1440p gaming. Posts 1 1 It's the year of AI For better or worse, we're seeing yet more launches marketed with artificial intelligence. You've likely heard of the term Copilot PC+ and if you haven't, you will when next shopping for a prebuilt desktop or laptop computer. So what exactly is all this AI PC and Copilot PC stuff? The two terms mean the same thing. They denote a PC with AI capabilities and enough processing power to handle AI tasks. An NPU is only required to achieve Copilot PC+ certification from Microsoft by hitting a set number of TOPS, excluding the CPU and GPU. But what does AI do? That's a good question! Microsoft, Apple, and most other tech companies are pushing AI-powered tools to consumers. 2024 saw an avalanche of these be released way ahead of time and it was a mess. No one knew what AI could help them with aside from being blasted left, right, and center through advertising new software and systems. 2025 should be different as we see the buzz continue to dwindle around AI and companies will have to work hard to make their AI offerings actually make sense for the average Joe and Jane. Nvidia teased this with the new RTX 50 series and its heavier reliance on AI processing to aid with frame generation to boost GPU performance. We'll likely see more from Intel and AMD that mimics the direction Nvidia is taking GeForce. Related 2025 will be the year Copilot+ hits its stride AI is taking center stage in Windows 11 Posts 1 CES 2025 was great for the PC Whether or not you care for AI and "AI PC", there were some big announcements from all the major players within the industry. It has also laid the foundations for quite the year for the PC. It will almost certainly be a bumpy ride for some (hello, Intel!), but more competition in areas such as GPUs should hopefully provide Team Blue with some much-needed wins. For AMD and Nvidia, it'll be interesting to see how the public reacts to the RTX 50 and RX 90 series launches. Prices will continue to be high for most system builds, but thankfully there's always Intel Arc with solid 1440p performance. What was your favorite takeaway from CES 2025?

Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs lead the AI revolution at CES 2025

Scripps News' Jason Bellini is on a mission to see everything on display at CES 2025 -- one booth at a time. (Scripps News) As most everyone expected, you couldn't walk past a single booth or have a conversation with anyone at this year's CES show without the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) being addressed. It was truly AI everywhere. The AI focus was particularly noticeable at companies who create PCs and the chips and software that power them. AI PCs and Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs were a big part of this year's show news, and for good reason. After their introduction in 2024, the category has quickly matured into the mainstream, with a huge range of new consumer and business-focused laptops unveiled at the show. Many of these new PCs were based on an impressive array of new processors from Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Nvidia that promise to bring a new set of capabilities to our workhorse devices. HP, for example, unveiled a new high-end, gaming laptop called the Omen Max 16, which offers the choice of either a new Intel Core Ultra 9 or AMD Ryzen AI 9 processor, as well as Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs. The combination delivers the fastest gaming performance the company has ever offered, while enabling AI acceleration for creative apps as well. In a sign of how CES has evolved into as much of a technology showcase for business as it is for consumer devices, some of HP's most interesting new notebooks were focused at commercial users. The most impressive is the company's new ZBook Ultra G1a portable workstation, which is based on AMD's new Ryzen AI Max Pro chip. While it's clearly not for everyone, the Zbook Ultra G1a is a powerhouse that's expected to outperform even the newest Apple M4 chip-equipped Macbook Pros on advanced graphics applications like 3D rendering. It also offers an extremely nice, OLED display with built-in blue light reduction and the fastest Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for accelerating AI workloads currently available. HP also took advantage of Intel's introduction of their Core Ultra Series 2 processors to launch their HP EliteBook X G1i lineup. Lenovo's splashiest new PC is their new ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 laptop with an impressive rollable screen that extends the normal 14" display into a 16.7" one that offers 50% more screen real estate (see our review of the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 at CES 2025 for more). Lenovo also debuted their Yoga Slim 9i, also powered by Intel's latest Core Ultra Series 2 processors, that Lenovo claims is the first to feature a camera under the display (as some smartphones now offer). This allows the laptop screen to extend to the edge of the top panel, creating a borderless effect and an industry-first 98% screen to body ratio. On the portable gaming front, Lenovo leveraged AMD's next-generation Z2 chip in their new Legion Go S handheld gaming device. Interestingly, it's available both in a version that runs Windows as well as one that runs SteamOS -- the first to be licensed to do so. In the case of Dell, the company generated nearly as much news on its new Apple-like product naming architecture that was unveiled at the show as it did its new products. In an effort to simplify its product naming -- an exercise that HP also recently went through -- Dell is moving away from sub-brands like XPS, Inspiron and others to a simple Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max lineup with two additional performance tiers (Plus and Premium) within each category. While it will take a bit to get used to for long-time Dell fans, there is logic behind the move that should pay off in the long run. One of the first products with the new naming is the Dell Pro 13 Premium, which incorporates Intel's latest AI-capable processors and weighs just 2.3 pounds. One other interesting note from Dell is that the company announced that they were going to offer a full range of AMD Ryzen AI Pro-powered notebooks for business buyers in addition to Intel options. As a long-time Intel-only company when it came to business laptops, the move generated an impressive amount of buzz. Realistically, though, it simply reflects the growing impact of AMD chips in the business world. Speaking of business -- or at least small business buyers -- Samsung also announced their new Galaxy Book 5 clamshell notebook and Galaxy Book 5 360 convertible notebook PCs, the company's first to offer dedicated AI acceleration. Both of the new Samsung notebooks feature the company's impressive OLED screen technology and are powered by the brand new commercial version of Intel's Core Ultra chips. Though it's targeted at software developers and AI model designers and not regular consumers, one of the most surprising PC launches at CES was the Nvidia Project Digits mini desktop PC. Featuring a powerful GPU based on the company's Blackwell architecture as well as a Mediatek-designed Arm CPU, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called Project Digits (the official name is still TBD) a personal supercomputer. Before you get too excited, though, the Project Digits system only runs a special version of the Linux operating system (and can't run Windows), doesn't run games, and starts at $3,000. Still, it offers an intriguing look into where the PC market (and Nvidia) could be headed. On a much more reasonable front, Qualcomm also introduced a new version of their Snapdragon X series of Arm-powered processors that found its way into PCs from Dell, HP and Lenovo among others. The new chip is bringing down the cost of Copilot+ PCs to the mainstream $799 and below price range by reducing the number of CPU cores down to 8 (from 10), but it still retains the same powerful Neural Processing Unit (NPU) as previous chips. This means it will still offer the same level of AI performance in the new set of PC applications that are starting to use the NPU. To be clear, while there are a few good examples of applications that use the NPU to run AI applications directly on the PC -- Microsoft's Copilot features, Adobe's suite of creative apps, videoconferencing tools like Zoom and Teams -- we're still waiting on a full range of AI PC applications. But what's great about all the latest capabilities in these AI PCs is that they are first and foremost much better computers than previous generations. They all offer significantly faster performance and much battery life, regardless of whether you currently want or need the AI capabilities right now. Given that most people hold onto their PCs for about 4-to-5 years, it just makes sense to get something that offers those capabilities integrated into your next PC so that you're prepared for the future. Plus, based on some of the amazing behind closed door previews I saw at CES for AI applications coming later this year, you won't have long to wait. USA TODAY columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst ofTECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm. You can follow him on Twitter@bobodtech.

Microsoft's Copilot+ PC price cuts didn't help disappointing sales apparently - but there's still a glimmer of hope

More affordable Arm-based Copilot+ PCs are likely to help Microsoft's cause in 2025 Microsoft and its manufacturing partners reportedly dropped prices for Copilot+ PCs substantially at the tail-end of last year, but the cuts didn't stimulate sales, according to an analyst firm - which could be a worry indeed for the future. The Register highlighted the move seemingly made in the final quarter of 2024, in which these AI laptops were reduced by 10% - going by the average distributor sale price in Europe. Marie-Christine Pygott, a senior analyst at Context, told The Register: "While price reductions helped stimulate some interest in Q4, the value proposition of these devices [Copilot+ PCs] still needs to be communicated more effectively to users." On a more positive note, Pygott added: "As the concept matures, awareness grows, and a greater range of price points is being addressed, we expect adoption rates to increase in 2025." The analyst tells us that more broadly, PC sales in Europe (for desktop computers and tablets, as well as laptops) witnessed some solid growth in the final quarter of last year, and sales for December were up 7% year-on-year, in fact. During the quarter, AI-capable laptops saw their adoption rate grow to 32%, up from 22% in Q3 - but despite the upward movement, that didn't match some forecasts (of 40% growth). However, the definition of an AI-capable laptop is any device with an NPU to pep up AI workloads, no matter how strong that NPU is. Copilot+ PCs are a separate category within that, calling for a powerful NPU of at least 40 TOPS, and in that subdivision, growth was much weaker - it went from 3% to only 5%, according to Context. Pygott told The Register that the leading notebooks in the world of AI PCs were Apple MacBooks (in Europe and the UK), but Lenovo and HP were making strong headway for market share (based on distributor sell-through data, we should note, not retailer sales). Whereas Microsoft's Surface devices are in pole position among the subcategory of Copilot+ PCs, unsurprisingly given how good these laptops are (the latest Surface Laptop is not just a great Copilot+ device, but also our best laptop overall, in fact). We must be cautious around a single set of analyst figures, but the sales picture presented here does look rather weak. What to do, then, for Microsoft and its big Copilot+ PC project? As Pygott points out, there are two obvious problems. Firstly, these devices were too costly at launch, and secondly, people don't really understand what the AI in an 'AI PC' adds to the whole experience (with good reason, and we'll come back to that). As Pygott observes: "These [Copilot+ PCs] are currently in the premium price range, but their value add is not always clear to users. We believe this will change as it becomes clearer to users what these PCs can do, and how the way they use a PC will change with AI, but it will take some time." As to the issues around cost, as Pygott tells us, a "greater range of price points is being addressed," which refers to the progress made in bringing in cheaper Snapdragon X chips. This will facilitate the release of more affordable Arm-based Copilot+ PCs (and Arm CPUs are still the majority for these devices). First off, we had the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core processor arrive in September 2024 ushering in more affordable Copilot+ PCs around the $800 level. Then, the new vanilla Snapdragon X was revealed at CES 2025, and this promises to reduce the cost of these AI laptops to around the $600 mark. The evolutions of these Arm-based notebooks may cut down the Snapdragon CPU, but crucially they do not mess with the powerful integrated NPU - it's the same as in higher-tier Snapdragon chips - so they still fully qualify as Copilot+ PCs, just models in truly affordable territory (come Black Friday or the like, we might see $500 price tags). And that should go a long way to helping stoke sales, which, after all, have been predicted to really take off this year (and going forward into the rest of the decade). The other sticking point of getting folks to realize the benefits of an AI-focused laptop is a trickier proposition, involving Microsoft bolstering the AI tricks infused in Windows 11, and particularly the Copilot+ PC exclusive features, naturally - such as Recall. That'll be the first order of the day - getting Recall out of testing, and working well so the feature sheds its controversial reputation (if indeed that is possible, at this stage of the game). But it feels like a tall order for Microsoft to have its suite of AI capabilities make a real impact on public perception, at least in 2025, anyway. The danger is that if it takes a lot longer for that to happen, the Copilot+ PC project is going to be saddled with a sense of confusion and pointlessness around these devices, which won't do the brand any favors. On a more positive note, it's not like good things aren't being done with this category of devices - they certainly are. As noted, Microsoft's latest Surface devices seriously impressed us here at TechRadar, and a Copilot+ PC from Asus was one of the most promising laptops we saw at CES 2025 recently. But while these might be great machines in many respects, the idea of where AI fits, and why it's such a key aspect - when it isn't really, not yet - remains the thorny issue.