The 12 months of AI PCs

MicrosoftThe developer conference Build begins on Tuesday and provides the corporate the chance to showcase its latest projects in the sector of artificial intelligence, following high-profile events hosted this month by OpenAI and Google.

One area where Microsoft has a definite advantage over others in AI competition is its ownership of Windows, which supplies the corporate an enormous PC user base.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 can be the 12 months AI becomes a “first-class part of every PC.”

The company already offers its chatbot assistant Copilot within the Bing search engine and, for a fee, within the office productivity software. Now PC users can learn more about how AI is embedded in Windows and what they’ll do with it on recent AI PCs.

Build comes days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its strongest AI model yet and showed how its Gemini AI will work on computers and phones. Ahead of the Google event, OpenAI announced its recent GPT-4o model. Microsoft is the lead investor in OpenAI and its Copilot technology relies on OpenAI's models.

For Microsoft, the challenge is to keep up a leadership position in AI and boost PC sales, which have been within the doldrums for the past two years after an upgrade cycle throughout the pandemic.

In a recent note on Dell Writing to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring said he stays “optimistic about the recovery of the PC market” based on comments from clients and up to date “upward revisions from notebook original design manufacturers (ODM).” .

Technology industry researcher Gartner estimated that PC shipments rose 0.9% within the quarter after a multi-year slump. Demand for PCs has been “slightly better than expected,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the corporate's quarterly earnings call last month.

New AI tools from Microsoft could provide another excuse for business and consumer customers to upgrade their aging computers, no matter whether or not they were manufactured by P.SDell or Lenovo.

“Although Copilot for Windows doesn't directly drive monetization, we believe it should increase Windows usage, Windows retention, customers moving toward more expensive, more powerful PCs (and therefore more revenue for Microsoft per device), and likely search revenue. The Bernstein analysts wrote this in a note to investors on April 26, one day after Microsoft's earnings announcement.

While Microsoft will provide the software for some of the AI ​​tasks sent to the Internet, its computers will be powered by chips from AMD, Intel And Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. This could include using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize a transcription without a connection.

The most important hardware addition to an AI PC is a so-called neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are specifically designed to handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally they are used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos or for speech recognition.

Microsoft has not yet said what AI PCs will be capable of without an internet connection. But Google's PIxel 8 Pro phone, which doesn't have a full computer processor, can use its Gemini Nano AI to summarize and transcribe recordings, recommend SMS replies, and more.

Computers with Intel's latest Lunar Lake chips with dedicated NPU are expected to hit the market in late 2024. Qualcomm's Snapdragon

Intel says The chips enable things like “real-time language translation, automation inference, and enhanced gaming environments.”

Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them in its recent M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is predicted to launch in the following round of Macs sometime this 12 months.

Qualcommnot how Intel And AMDoffers chips powered by poor-based architecture. One of Microsoft's sessions can be in regards to the “next generation of Windows on Arm.” This might be about how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and the way that differs from Intel and AMD versions of Windows.

According to current data, Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD at 13% Data from Canalys.

In the past, Qualcomm has promoted Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting their longer battery life, thinner design and other advantages akin to cellular connectivity. However, previous versions of Qualcomm chips offered consumers limited options. For example, in 2018, the corporate's Snapdragon 835 chip couldn't run most Windows applications.

Microsoft has now improved Windows to handle traditional apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company even has one FAQ page specifically for computers running on ARM hardware.

Microsoft may also host sessions like “AI Everywhere,” which can deal with “accelerating generative AI models” on devices running within the cloud.

An “Azure AI Studio” session will explore how developers can construct their very own Copilot chatbots, potentially much like what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. For example, imagine an organization making a chatbot that might help employees select health advantages.

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