All the artificial intelligences that we can use daily to create texts or generate images such as ChatGPT, Copilot (formerly Bing Chat), Midjourney, DALL-E and others, carry out the computing process in the cloud, on the servers of these companies . , so its performance and, above all, its privacy, leave much to be desired.
Fortunately, this is about to change when NPUs (neural processing units) become commonplace in equipment released to the market in the coming years, equipment which would have to meet a series of requirements to be considered PC equipped with AI among those found (in addition to an NPU to run Copilot locally), a dedicated button on the keyboard next to a CPU and a GPU.
According to Intel, after holding several meetings with Microsoft, the Redmond-based company’s idea is for AI processes to run directly on the NPU, leaving out the CPU and GPU for the life of the battery, and therefore electricity consumption. is not to the point of reducing battery life.
A few months ago, an internal Microsoft document was leaked stating that PCs with AI will need a minimum of 16 GB of storage. RAM memory to be able to use Copilot locally and that, to be able to do so, the team needs an NPU, but, at this time, the power that would be necessary has not been disclosed, although various rumors have circulated at this subject.
AI-enabled PCs are the future
While Microsoft continues without commenting on the subject, we must rely on the information announced by Intel in Taipei, the city where a conference on artificial intelligence is being held and where Intel executives answered questions from the public, one among them being knowing what would be the number of TOPS needed to be able to run Copilot locally.
In order to run Copilot locally, the NPU integrated into the processor will need to offer a Power 40 HIGH. At the moment, the only processor that meets these power specifications is Qualcomm’s new line of ARM architecture processors, with the Snapdragon 45 TOPS performances and it will hit the market at the end of this year.
It is not known what power the Snapdragon X Plus model will offer, a processor even more powerful than the Both manufacturers still have a long way to go.
The NPU processor range Meteor Lake offers a power of 10 TOPS, while the platform Ryzen 8000 Hawk Point with integrated NPU, it reaches 16 TOPS. What is clear is that now a new war has begun for which manufacturer offers the greatest number of TOPS.
If you are planning to renew your old computer or are considering the possibility of renewing it, you can wait until the end of the year to see the proposal that Intel, AMD and Qualcomm offer us, provided that you need to run Microsoft. Co-pilot locally.
