Tim Danton Editor-in-chief
How fortunate I am that such a script would magically appear! One that so handily demonstrates the eternal battle been local and remote computing, when that’s exactly what I wanted to address this month.
This decade, the battleground is AI. You may have heard of it. You’ve probably heard the term “AI PCs” in the past few months, too, as AMD, Intel and Microsoft have all attempted to jump on board this most lucrative of bandwagons. One that has seen Nvidia’s share value jump from $250 to $900 in the space of a year. That graph must bring a smile to the lips of Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang every time he sees it.
Nvidia’s value has leapt because of its dominance within the AI space. Not in our local PCs but in the data centres that we access whenever we ask ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini a question. But while AMD and Intel are ramping up their efforts to produce AI accelerators to use in data centres, they see an opportunity in our personal systems, too. Every new processor they release from this point will shout about NPUs and TOPS, standing for neural processing units and tera operations per second respectively. Rather than run AI in the cloud, they want it to shift to our home and work computers.
As of now, the battle begins in earnest. If you turn to p28 you will see exactly what you can do with AI PCs today (and we drill into the hazy definition of what the term actually means), and what the future holds.
You don’t need to look far for examples in this issue’s pages, either. Whether it’s the stylish Dell XPS 14 (see p48), Apple’s M3 updates to the MacBook Air (see p54) or gaming systems such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (see p58) and Cyberpower Ultra R77 (see p60), all the raw ingredients are in evidence.
I have more good news for Nvidia shareholders, too. While the talk may about NPUs, the GPU remains one of the most important components in AI PCs. Whether the momentum swings from remote to local, or vice versa, Jensen Huang will remain one very happy man.
EXT. Milky Way galaxy. Zoom into Earth. Show passage of time by speedy rotation of planet against background movement of planets and the Sun. Top left corner indicates the years, starting with 4.5 BILLION YEARS AGO then blurring as Earth spins.
Voice of God (VOG) “Throughout time, there has been a battle. Not between good and evil, but between local and remote.”
Rotation of planet slows. Spinning dates slow until settles on l964 at top-left corner. Zoo
