By Ryan Shrout
Big Tech is competing to put AI on your laptop. Here’s the front-runner.
Computex, an annual convention that brings the tech world together every June in hot and humid Taipei, Taiwan, hosted keynote speeches last week from all the major players in consumer AI. The CEOs from Nvidia (NVDA), AMD (AMD), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Intel (INTC) drew large crowds. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang needed a sporting arena to hold the audience. But all of them explored their views on how the PC market will drastically change over the next 12 months, and the future of artificial intelligence on the PC. Here’s a look at the potential winners and losers:
AMD
AMD spent the most time talking about consumer products during CEO Lisa Su’s keynote session, launching two different product lines. The Ryzen 9000 series looks to be the highest-performance desktop platform for gaming and creator audiences looking to upgrade workstations and PCs, and will help AMD continue its push to gain market share over Intel in this small but high-impact business.
The Ryzen AI 300 series of parts, meanwhile, is a new chip built specifically for the AI PC laptop segment, combining a new CPU architecture, upgraded graphics design, and an NPU (neural processing unit) capable of 50 TOPS (trillions of operations per second). If the claims AMD made from a performance perspective hold up, it will likely be the fastest of the new processors for AI PCs this year, but it could come at the expense of energy efficiency. That means lower battery life and more heat, something that Microsoft (MSFT) is pushing to see its partners improve in order to compete with Apple (AAPL) systems.
AMD will ship systems based on this new AI chip ahead of Intel, which means there is an opportunity for AMD to gain market traction.
Qualcomm
Though Qualcomm hasn’t announced anything new from a technology perspective since its Snapdragon X series of AI PC chips was released at the May Microsoft Surface event, Chief Executive Cristiano Amon highlighted the wide adoption and partnerships for the company’s first truly competitive Windows platform. CEOs and executives from Dell Technologies (DELL), HP (HPQ), Lenovo Group (HK:992), ASUS (TW:2357), Acer (TW:2353) and Microsoft all joined Amon on stage.
Retailers worldwide are hungry for a reason to entice consumers to purchase and upgrade their PCs.
Qualcomm looks ready to take the fight to Intel and AMD in the retail and consumer space, partnering with the Windows team to build campaigns and marketing to highlight the advantages and features of the new Copilot+ PC category Microsoft launched last month. Only Qualcomm will have a chip that is ready and compatible with Copilot+ this summer and fall; it isn’t clear when AMD and Intel will be ready and enabled through the operating system for these industry-changing features.
Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire also talked up its partnership with retailers like Best Buy (BBY), Costco (COST), and Amazon.com (AMZN) as a reason to believe that its new platform will exceed sales expectations. Retailers worldwide are hungry for a reason to entice consumers to purchase and upgrade their PCs, and with the weight of Microsoft pushing the AI PC as “the new Windows,” it looks like 2024 could be a big year.
Intel
Intel used the show in Taiwan to dive into extensive detail of its new architecture called Lunar Lake – a drastic shift in architecture from previous iterations, combining all-new CPU cores with a 50% faster graphics system and an NPU that is 4x faster than the currently shipping Core Ultra processor family. Intel did not share more specific performance information about how Lunar Lake will compare against the solutions from AMD and Qualcomm, but that can be expected closer to its availability.
This is the big question mark for Intel: When exactly will Lunar Lake come to market? The company said that “late Q3” is the target, with reviews and systems available for purchase. My talks with system OEMs last week seemed to indicate that the timeframe might be a bit aggressive, and every week that goes by where Intel is without a strong competitor for the AI PC space is one that leaves sales and momentum to the other chip players.
The truth is that Microsoft and the market as a whole need Intel to make the AI PC race a success at all. Qualcomm and AMD might offer as-good-or-better chip solutions, but neither could scale to the quantity needed to satisfy the market for any extended period, at least not yet. For now, Intel as the market share leader by a wide margin is the only way we’ll see Windows and Copilot+ reach a broad audience.
Nvidia
For now, Nvidia has a completely different angle on the AI PC. Instead of having a chip that combines the CPU, GPU, and NPU for a laptop in a thin and light form factor like its rivals, Nvidia is looking to its GPU brand GeForce to carry its flag for the AI PC. Huang’s keynote that opened the Computex week didn’t talk much about Nvidia’s ambitions in the PC space, instead focusing on the data center market, but the company had other meetings to discuss it.
Nvidia’s stance is clear: They are the leader in AI computing, have been driving the most AI software development (including both tools to create new AI applications and the AI apps themselves) and offer the most possible performance for AI to utilize. That’s true: GeForce GPUs offer an order of magnitude more computing capability compared to the NPUs in the Qualcomm, Intel, or AMD chips. Nearly all the software that is creatively using AI for things like text-to-image generation, audio or noise removal, and frame generation to improve gaming experiences was built to run on Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs first.
But discrete GPUs are expensive and aren’t installed in all PCs, desktop or laptops. They aren’t as power-efficient during that AI processing as an NPU, which means battery life can be compromised. For professionals and content creators who utilize AI to get work done, where performance is the biggest concern, Nvidia will continue to have an advantage.
Winners and losers
The biggest winner so far appears to be Qualcomm.
The biggest winner so far appears to be Qualcomm. Its latest Snapdragon processor will have a timed exclusive for computers that can call themselves Copilot+ PCs, and because of that Microsoft and retailers will be unilaterally marketing and driving sales. Qualcomm will be using its exclusivity both to sell chips and drive revenue, but also to create performance and capability leadership stories that can help maintain relevancy into 2025 and beyond.
Intel may have the hardest road ahead since its Lunar Lake product won’t be available until late in the year. Additionally, there are questions about when Microsoft will enable these new specific OS-level AI features on non-Snapdragon processors, which could extend Qualcomm’s technological advantage even longer. There is no doubt Intel will get its part of the pie in this AI PC cycle, but there are questions about how extensive the volume is for Lunar Lake and how that will impact the system OEM’s choice of processor for the next 12 months.
AMD’s position is somewhere in the middle. Its new AI chip will be available earlier than Intel’s, but it will still lack the AI-specific features of Copilot+ until some undetermined time in the future. It may offer the highest performance solution for these laptops but could also be at the bottom of the stack when it comes to battery life. There is much more testing to be done before this can be determined, but current signs point in that direction.
The good news for system vendors like Dell, HP and Lenovo is that they benefit from all of this. Companies that can create designs using all three vendors’ chips will be able to target different regions and channels, and at price points that maximize sales revenue and volume. There is some risk in overreliance on any one chip vendor, of course, but the excitement and interest in the AI PC space will likely minimize potential drawbacks.
Ryan Shrout is the President of Signal65 and founder at Shrout Research. Follow him on X @ryanshrout. He has provided consulting services for AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, Arm Holdings, Micron Technology, Nvidia and others. Shrout holds shares of Intel.
More: Apple’s WWDC is Monday. Here are 5 things to expect as AI comes into focus.
Plus: ‘AI now has to play out elsewhere’ for Nvidia’s valuation to make sense, ARK’s Cathie Wood says
-Ryan Shrout
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06-15-24 1255ET
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