Reports say computers will soon need a lot more memory
Question of the Fortnight
You might already be fed up reading that 2024 will be the year of AI PCs. Microsoft has banged home the message with every announcement of the past few months. It means little to the average user at present, but is likely to have a big impact in future – especially when it comes to decisions about upgrading Windows on your computer.
A report from market analysts TrendForce claims Microsoft will set a “baseline” of 16GB of RAM for the next generation of Windows machines (www.snipca. com/49049). That’s a huge jump from the minimum of 4GB for Windows 11, let alone 2GB for Windows 10 (if you don’t know yours, type RAM into Windows search and look under ‘Device specifications’ – see screenshot below).
This increase gets to the heart of what Microsoft means by ‘AI PC’. It plans to build them around Copilot, which is the company’s much-hyped tool for performing tasks on your PC and searching the web. By using AI, Copilot is more versatile and useful than Cortana ever was – or so Microsoft hopes.
Whether this justifies Microsoft using the term ‘AI PC’ is beside the point. What matters is that Copilot requires a lot of processing power and memory to work at full potential. But TrendForce doesn’t actually provide any evidence Microsoft is considering increasing RAM requirements.
It seems to base the claim on the obvious point that Microsoft is “poised to integrate Copilot into the next generation of Windows, making Copilot a fundamental requirement for AI PCs”. Any analyst could have told you that. In fact, we just did – two paragraphs ago.
The first wave of AI PCs don’t back up TrendForce’s claim. Dell says its new XPS 13 laptop, which it describes as a “futuristic design, with built-in AI” (www.snipca.com/49050), will need only 8GB RAM.
The AI it refers to is provided by Intel’s Core Ultra processor, which is powered by a neural processing unit (NPU). These are vital to AI PCs because they help computers perform complex tasks such as learning what the user wants to do, and recognising images and speech.
It seems implausible that Dell would herald the XPS 13 as an AI device if it lacked enough RAM to actually carry out any AI tasks. Furthermore, the laptop’s keyboard comes with Microsoft’s new Copilot
