Partner content - Why AI PCs are the next chapter in personal computing

AI PCs are expected to be a major tech trend over the next few years, with the buzz surrounding AI PCs and their implications for personal computing already significant.

Chip makers, OEMs and more are striving to make their mark on this emerging market and industry leaders such as Qualcomm will have to work carefully with their channel partners to bring AI PCs to their customers.

During a recent webinar hosted by TD Synnex, Kyle Houser, Director, Commercial Channel at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. shared his thoughts on the AI PC market and the progress Qualcomm and its partners are making in this area.

What benefits do AI PCs offer over traditional PCs?

“Traditionally you’ve used your PC to do work. With the AI PC you can have the PC do the work for you in a fraction of the time. Some of the key benefits are around productivity, task creation and execution…you’re able to make better decisions in your business as your PC has historical context around you as the user. It can help you quickly find files and data sources using common language prompts as well as delivering unique insights.”

“One of the biggest areas is security. By taking advantage of the on-device AI capabilities you can enhance security protocols and protect user data and corporate data.

How do NPUs enhance the capabilities of AI PCs?

“When you use NPU, you can improve meeting experiences not just in one way though visual blurring or noise reduction, you can use them all at once…If you leverage the NPU instead of the GPU to run those benefits, it helps your battery life and it helps the performance of your device.

“The other thing is content creation whether it’s your creatives with image generation, or a salesperson creating a deck for a QBR. Being able to do that on the device without having to always be connected to the cloud can provide serious productivity benefits.

“The third one is around language translation…being able to run language translation locally on the device. When you’re having a meeting in person or through a platform, you can translate on your device so I can speak my native language and you can speak yours.”

What is Qualcomm’s vision for integrating AI into personal computing and how does it align with the company’s wider goals?

“It’s been a multi-decade journey in terms of our investment and development of AI solutions across various different types of technology. We’re an engineering company and we set out to solve complex, highly impactful customer problems.

“When you think about compute, this is an industry that we feel is prime for disruption. The reason being it has been a while since the industry had some excitement on the PC side. As one partner put it to me, this is the biggest opportunity with the PC since Wi-Fi. There’s an opportunity to put the PC at the centre of our diversification strategy and bring the best of what we know about the mobile world and the best of what we know about bringing the highly complex, impactful experiences to the end user wherever they may be, in an automobile, in a factory, or in this case in front of a laptop.”

“We’re addressing some of those key pain points that we see customers have with their PCs, such as battery life or performance degradation over time.”

How does Qualcomm differentiate its product in the market?

“Talking with IT decision-makers, executives and partners, we know the biggest challenge with the PC today comes down to performance and battery life. We also know that every customer is still trying to figure out how they harness the power of AI within their existing IT budgets. It’s not realistic for every customer to go out and build a cloud environment or an on-device data centre environment for their own LLMs. We know that they have to put some of that workload on the edge. We design our chips with the end user and the way they work in mind.

“With our Windows on Snapdragon® based architecture, we’re able to deliver better performance across the CPU, GPU and NPU at a third of the power of our competitors. When you’re deploying across thousands of users in an enterprise environment, that can have an impact on carbon footprint.”

How does Qualcomm see the role of AI in PCs evolving? Are there any upcoming innovations or technological advancements that we can anticipate?

“I’m starting to see a lot of new and emerging experiences with our ISV community that are taking advantage of the on-device capabilities that Snapdragon® X Elite is bringing to the market. For example, the folks at Da Vinci Resolve have demonstrated the benefits of rendering and editing videos on device at 5, 7, 10 times the speed they’re able to on their existing platforms. I think we’re starting to see more and more use cases come into the fold from developers that want to take advantage of offloading workloads from the CPU and GPU to the NPU.

“What we’re going to watch happen in this industry as it moves more and more on-device is developers and ISVs popping up with new solutions that don’t exist yet today. There is an opportunity for some of the ecosystem partners like Microsoft or Google to start to take advantage of cross application capabilities leveraging the NPU. I think it’s going to be an exciting time to watch the industry and see what happens.”

What is the opportunity for the reseller channel to partner with Qualcomm?

“Our commercial enterprise customers need our help. There’s a lot of noise around AI right now, and they’re trying to discern what’s real, what’s not, how they can best optimise their AI strategy, what should live in the cloud, what should live on-device. So, I think there’s an opportunity for us to come together and help customers solve those problems, whether that’s through services led engagement or thought leadership based on our experience.

“I think we can bring together your capabilities as a reseller partner or an ISV with our knowledge and experience to help customers address a lot of the challenges and questions they have.

“There’s a services opportunity for our partners to help customers bring these devices into their environment, understand how they work within their infrastructure, application and ecosystem, and ultimately become more productive.”

Click here to learn more from Qualcomm and TD SYNNEX on AI PCs and the future of personal computing.

Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

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