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To the surprise of exactly nobody who has been following the PC industry the last six months, “AI PCs” were everywhere at CES 2024, powered by new chips like Intel’s Core Ultra and AMD’s Ryzen 8000 with dedicated “Neural Processor Units” (NPUs). These help accelerate AI tasks locally, rather than reaching out to cloud servers (like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot). But what does that actually mean for you, an everyday computer user?
That’s the question I hoped to answer as I wandered the show floor, visiting PC makers of all shapes and sizes. Most early implementations of local, NPU-processed software has focused heavily on creator workloads — improving performance in tools like Adobe Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and Audacity. But how can local AI help Joe Schmoe?
After scouring the show, I can say that NPU improvements aren’t especially compelling yet in these early days — though if you have an Nvidia GPU, you’ve already got powerful, practical AI at your fingertips.
But first, NPU-based AI.
Local AI takes baby steps
The HP Omen Transcend.
IDG / Matthew Smith
Frankly, NPU-driven AI isn’t compelling yet, though it can pull off some cool parlor tricks.
HP’s new Omen Transcend 14 showed off how the NPU can be used to offload video-streaming tasks while the GPU ran Cyberpunk 2077 — nifty, to be sure, but once again focused on creators. Acer’s Swift laptops thankfully take a more practical angle. They integrate Temporal Noise Reduction and what Acer calls PurifiedView and PurifiedVoice 2.0 for AI-filtered audio and video, with a three-mic array, and there are more AI capabilities promised to come later this year.
MSI’s stab at local AI also tackles cleaning up Zoom and Teams calls. A Core Ultra laptop demo showed Windows Studio Effects tapping the NPU to automatically blur the background of a video call. Next to it, a laptop set up with Nvidia’s awesome AI-powered Broadcast software was doing the same. The Core Ultra laptop used dramatically less power than the Nvidia notebook, since it didn’t need to fire up a discrete GPU to process the background blur, shunting the task to the low-power NPU instead. So that’s cool — and unlike RTX Broadcast, it doesn’t require you to have a GeForce graphics card installed.
Just as practically, MSI’s new AI engine intelligently detects what you’re doing on your laptop and dynamically changes the battery profile, fan curves, and display settings as needed for the task. Play a game and everything gets cranked; start slinging Word docs and everything ramps down. It’s cool, but existing laptops already do this to some degree.
MSI also showed off a nifty AI Artist app, running on the popular Stable Diffusion local generative AI art framework, that lets you create images from text prompts,