Intel and AMD are building AI into PCs. It doesn't matter yet-but it will

CES 2023 showed us the future of Al in PCs, but 2024 and beyond is where we'll reach it.

-  MARK HACHMAN

The rise of consumer-focused artificial intelligence applications (like Al art, fave.co/3YnSzFq, and ChatGPT, fave.co/3wnujwM) was the most dynamic trend of 2022. But don't get too excited quite yet-buying new laptops from AMD and Intel with Al functions built in aren't worth opening your wallet. Given the breakneck pace of Al development, though, they may very well become next year's CES.

Here's what's going on. Deep within the confusing mishmash (fave.co/3XMVZ31) of processor architectures that make up AMD's latest mobile Ryzen chips (fave.co/3WnH8ev) lies XDNA, the new Al hardware architecture that AMD is launching within the Ryzen Mobile 7040 Series as "Ryzen Al." (Think of XDNA as the Al version of RDNA, the foundation of AMD's Radeon graphics cores.) Intel has similar plans, though right now it's using a discrete Movidius Al card (fave.co/3WsOjUx) as a placeholder until its Meteor Lake chips integrate a "real" Al core (fave.co/3XwKbST). Qualcomm has offered Al technology as part of its Arm-based Snapdragon chips for years, which power most smartphones but are a niche player in Windows PCs.