So, I have to lead off with a story from the Register.
According to Intel’s senior director of technical marketing, an “AI PC” is simply a PC that packs a GPU, a processor with a neural processing unit, and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions. Intel’s current-generation desktop processors, specifically the 14th-gen Core (Core Ultra/Meteor Lake), meet these criteria. Intel does not consider “AI PC” to be a brand or a spec but instead believes it represents what PCs will be like in the future. AI PCs are not required to run AI, but PCs without an NPU will perform slower.
That didn’t take long to determine that AI PC is a marketing term only.
Is it a future standard? Perhaps. Most users will focus on what their machines can do, not the components, and this will simply be measured in “how well does it run my AI applications”… of which most AI will probably run in the cloud.
Let’s not get distracted – and more importantly, not distract customers.