REALITY OF AI PCS

TODAY'S PROMISE, TOMORROW'S POTENTIAL

- SADAT OSMAN

The age of “AI PCs” is upon us. Touted as the next evolution in personal computing, these devices promise to embed generative AI and machine-learning capabilities directly into everyday laptops and desktops. Instead of offloading image enhancement, transcription, or code generation to the cloud, AI PCs aim to perform those tasks locally—instantly, privately, and even offline. But how far have we come? In this feature, we cut through marketing hype to assess what AI PCs truly deliver today, the limitations they face, and what the road ahead might look like.

Rise of AI-enabled hardware

Central to the AI PC vision is specialized silicon. Modern processors—from Intel's Core Ultra series with integrated AI engines to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon compute platforms—now include Neural Processing Units (NPUs) or dedicated AI accelerators that speed up inference tasks by up to 20x compared to CPU-only approaches. Apple's M-series chips pioneered on-die neural cores, and on Windows, “Copilot+ PCs” combine Intel's new hardware with Microsoft's generative-AI toolkit to offer real-time natural-language search, summarization, and image editing.

Software ecosystem & AI workloads