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 (as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot do). 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 have focused heavily on creator workloads—improving performance in tools like Adobe Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and Audacity. How can local AI help the average user?
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 , you’ve already got powerful, practical AI at
