Although NVIDIA claims that the definition of a PC with AI It can only be used on computers that use a graphics card from this manufacturer, processor manufacturers do not have the same thinking. Intel, AMD and Qualcomm already offer processors that replace functions related to Artificial Intelligence through an NPU (Neural Processing Unit).
While it is true that the power offered by NVIDIA graphics is much higher than what we can find in any processor on the market, for many users it is more than enough, especially for those looking for a laptop where the dedicated graph has no use on a day-to-day basis and where it is important to be able to perform tasks related to Artificial Intelligence locally.
Intel processors with NPU
If we talk about the range of Intel processors with AI, we have to talk about the Core Ultra range, a range available in several models that include a NPU and which, according to the company, are optimized to perform AI tasks with more than 500 language models. These language models are the most used today and include OpenVINO, Model ZOO, ONNX Model Zoo, PyTorch and Hugging Face among others such as Mistral, Whisper, Calls and Stable Diffusion.
According to Intel, reaching this milestone has been possible thanks to Intel’s commitment to AI PCs, processors which arrived at the end of 2023 and whose sales will increase substantially in the coming years to allow users to reduce execution times based on AI and without depending on an Internet connection.
In the market we can find AI models focused on the creation of text, editing and generation of images and audio and even video and it is not always possible to depend on an Internet connection to be able to interact with them. Artificial intelligence models also allow you to make text summaries, extract the most important information automatically, eliminate or replace unwanted objects, enlarge the size of images and much more.
NVIDIA is still the best option
As we have commented above, the power currently offered by the NPUs of Intel processors (as well as those of amd and Qualcomm with the Snapdragon The Intel Core Ultra range offers a maximum of 40 TOPS in the most powerful models, more or less the same performance that we can find in AI processors from both AMD and the new ones from Qualcomm.
In fact, NVIDIA has published a graph where we can see, as with the current generation of graphics cards in the RTX 40 range, the basic model, the RTX 4060 offers 100 TOPS of performance, a performance that Intel NPUs will achieve with the next generation of the Core Ultra. NVIDIA’s most powerful model, the RTX 4090 reaches 5458 TOPS, a distance.
