Dell, MSI and Others Love The Label, But It Is A Lot Of Sound And Fury
The chances are you’ve received at least a few emails from system builders touting their new AI PC line of products, and you might have assumed it was official branding. The marketing would like you to believe that it is similar to Centrino or vPro, which are branding that indicates the capabilities of chips with those labels, but the truth is that AI PC is simply a marketing term. Robert Hallock confirmed to The Register that since “AI PC doesn’t include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds“, it isn’t considered an exact specification for branding.
An AI PC is a system which contains a GPU and a processor with a neural processing unit which can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions. AVX-VNNI has been supported on Intel since Alder Lake and every GPU released in the past few years supports Dp4a. It is true that only Zen 5 chips from AMD properly support AVX-VNNI, which does give Intel a bit of a leg up on the AI PC market. As was mentioned previously though, if you want to run an LLM effectively you need serious memory and storage bandwidth to manage that, and Intel’s AI PC moniker doesn’t guarantee that.
If you or someone you know is excited about the new AI PC lines from various manufacturers, please do keep that in mind.
