NVIDIA: Premium AI PC is powered by GPU, not NPU
NVIDIA held a meeting with the press discussing AI in modern computers.
This might be a glimpse of what Jensen is preparing for the pre-Computex keynote set for next month. The AI revolution, as many PC hardware companies like to see it, has begun with the increased popularity of AI chatbots and generative multimedia. However, for NVIDIA, that revolution began in 2018 with the introduction of AI-powered DLSS upscaling, which certainly needed some improvements at the time.
In 2024, NVIDIA does not want anyone to forget that AI has always been the domain of graphics processors, not NPUs, and even to this day, they deliver superior performance. NVIDIA is pushing the idea of Basic AI powered by NPU, which delivers anything from 10 to 45 TOPS for AI workloads, which is enough to run some basic tools, or the Premium AI PC powered by GPU, delivering anything from 100 to 1300 TOPS.
Basic AI PC vs. Premium AI PC, Source: NVIDIA
According to NVIDIA, the install base of Premium AI PCs is already at 100 million units, whereas the NPU-based systems haven’t even reached 1 million sales by the end of 2023. It’s worth noting that this would imply that AMD has also sold less than 1 million units because Phoenix-based Ryzen 7000U/H systems have been around for a while, and they have XDNA AI accelerator delivering 10 TOPS. Nevertheless, the popularity of “Basic AI PC” is certainly higher now with the release of Intel Core Ultra CPUs.
Apart from the obvious AI-acceleration support for NVIDIA GPUs through PyTorch, ONNX, and TensorFlow, NVIDIA has several technologies either available or coming to games in the future, such as DLSS, RTX Remix, and NVIDIA ACE. The latter is probably the most interesting concept, allowing game developers to create virtual characters who can talk to players based on predefined variables.
Premium AI PC features, Source: NVIDIA
Future advanced AI workloads will certainly still rely on graphics. Even Intel, which is about to launch its Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” CPUs later this year, are advertising it with 100 TOPS, which is the combined power of CPU, NPU, and GPU. Technically, though, taking NVIDIA nomenclature into account, that would put Intel CPU into the Premium AI PC category.
Source: BenchLife
