KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- An AI PC is a laptop or desktop computer with hardware specially designed to accelerate AI workloads.
- Laptops with a neural processing unit (NPU) and/or a graphics processing unit (GPU) are more efficient at running AI apps and features.
- A Copilot+ PC like the Vivobook S 15 (2024) has a powerful NPU with 40+ TOPS, making it ready to access Copilot+ features like Recall.
- A custom-built desktop AI PC with a modern graphics card or a powerful laptop with a GPU are your best choices for getting premium performance in AI workloads.
- Ultracompact ASUS NUC Mini PCs put the power of AI into space-saving, highly configurable designs.
- AI PC performance is measured in tera operations per second, or TOPS.
- An AI PC brings many advantages for productivity, gaming, creative work, communications, and everyday computing.
Right now, the tech landscape is witnessing its biggest change in decades. AI is here, and it’s revolutionizing everything. It’s changing how we search, how we game, how we create, how we communicate, how we stay organized, and so much more. Considering everything that AI can do today — and everything that we’re seeing on the horizon — now is a great time to get the lay of the land. What is an AI PC? How are people using it for work, play, creativity, and everyday computing? What PC hardware do you need to get started? Here, we’ll answer all these questions and more.
Do I need a PC to use AI?
If you’re just looking to dip your toes in what AI can do, you don’t need anything more than a device with an internet connection. Through apps like ChatGPT, AI-powered search engines like Bing, or new features on your smartphone like Google Magic Eraser, you can get answers to just about any question, a quick summary of a long email chain, advanced photo editing tools, and more.
While these cloud-based AI solutions are convenient, and they make it possible to access these powerful tools on devices with limited processing power, you might be better off with an AI PC. With a cloud-based AI service, you might be held back by request limits, long queues, or high subscription fees. You might need a locally operated AI solution due to privacy requirements. Perhaps you’re most interested in how AI can accelerate the PC apps you use for creative work and everyday productivity — or the games that you play after hours. For these reasons and more, many people are choosing an AI PC in addition to cloud-based AI solutions.
What is an AI PC?
On a technical level, an AI PC is a laptop or desktop computer with hardware specially designed to accelerate AI workloads. That specialized hardware might come in the form of a CPU with both a neural processing unit (NPU) and an integrated graphics processing unit (GPU). An AI PC might also harness the power of a modern discrete GPU. When you open an AI app or use an AI-powered feature like Generative Fill in Adobe Photoshop, your NPU or GPU runs the task quickly and efficiently. If your PC isn’t equipped with this kind of AI hardware, it won’t be able to run most AI-powered apps and features quickly enough for you to truly benefit from new technology.
But an AI PC consists of much more than a CPU and GPU stuffed in a box. An AI PC doesn’t just run AI apps and assistants; it uses AI (and similar technologies) behind the scenes to streamline everything about how you use your PC. With an AI PC, you can enjoy more performance, quieter cooling, better battery life for your laptop, and more. Since many of those features are functions of your motherboard, operating system, or BIOS, many folks think holistically of an AI PC as a complete solution, not just a specialized CPU or GPU.
Can a laptop be considered an AI PC?
Yes, there are many laptops that offer specialized hardware that’s ready for AI. If you’re looking for an AI laptop powered by an Intel CPU, it’s the latest Core Ultra processors that include an integrated NPU. AMD Ryzen 7040 and 8040 Series processors are built on AMD XDNA NPUs to provide AI acceleration on laptop PCs. The AI space is evolving rapidly, so watch for announcements from these companies about upcoming CPU designs that will boost your AI experience even further. One example of an AI-ready laptop that you can buy today is the all-new Zenbook 14 OLED powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor.
Additionally, you can look for an AI laptop equipped with a discrete GPU. Since the last couple generations of GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD are AI-ready, it’s quite easy to find an AI-compatible laptop that meets your needs and budget. NVIDIA began augmenting the AI capabilities of its graphics cards with its 20 Series GPUs, while AMD ushered in AI with their GPU solutions with its RDNA 2 architecture. A laptop like the 2024 ROG Zephyrus G14 gives you not only a CPU with an integrated NPU, but an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU.
We should note that Microsoft recently introduced a new category of PCs designed for AI called “Copilot+ PCs.” The first Copilot+ PCs, like the ASUS Vivobook S 15 powered by the Snapdragon X Elite Platform, are available for preorder now, and they’ll unlock new ways of using your PC by putting AI at the center of your PC experience. If using Copilot+ features is a must-have on your shopping checklist, we recommend looking for a laptop that specifically advertises compatibility with Copilot+. Even a laptop with an integrated NPU might not meet Microsoft’s hardware requirements for Copilot+.
Can I build my own AI PC?
Yes, you can build your own AI PC. By equipping your custom-built PC with a modern graphics card, you’re supplying it with the horsepower it needs for demanding AI workflows.
For its last three generations of graphics cards NVIDIA has built in AI capabilities with its specialized Tensor cores. The latest 40 Series GeForce RTX GPUs boast the company’s most advanced hardware for accelerating AI. Your options range from the affordable ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 all the way to the top-of-the-line ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090. On the AMD side, any 6000-Series or 7000-Series GPU is ready to get you rolling with AI.
Of course, you’ll need a complete PC to accompany that graphics card. For an AI PC, we recommend that you opt for high-bandwidth DDR5 RAM and speedy storage. A modern motherboard, like one of our Z790 motherboards, will not only support this cutting edge-hardware, but boost your experience with intelligent controls that react in real-time to monitoring data to ensure that you’re getting the most of your AI PC at every moment. The ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero, for example, uses AI Overclocking, DIMM Flex, AI Networking, AI Cooling II, and Two-Way AI Noise Cancelation to provide optimized performance, quiet yet powerful cooling, and crystal-clear communications — all with minimal setup.
Can I get an AI PC in an ultracompact design?
You might be surprised by how many options you have for getting AI performance in a compact PC. Through our ASUS NUC lineup, we provide businesses and everyday users alike with the powerful components, connectivity, and app support that they expect from a PC, but in surprisingly compact designs that offer the best performance per liter.
With the stylish ASUS NUC 14 Pro+, you’ll be able to harness a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU. Armed with Intel’s latest hybrid architecture, which integrates the CPU, GPU, and NPU (Neural Process Unit) into a single package, this chip puts exciting new AI capabilities at your fingertips.
The ASUS NUC 14 Pro can be configured with up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU, a chip that’s ready to use the power of AI to supercharge your workflows through its CPU cores, integrated neural processing unit (NPU), and integrated Arc GPU. Additionally, you’ll get the Intel vPro Enterprise platform for business-class AI performance, comprehensive security, remote manageability, and proven stability. The ASUS NUC 14 Pro is the only PC powered by Intel Core Ultra CPUs that offers Local/Remote Platform Erase, Platform Service Record, and One-Click Recovery, all key vPro manageability features available to organizations that use Intel AMT.
Do you need the specialized hardware of a discrete GPU? The ROG NUC provides exceptional performance for AI workloads with the combination of an Intel Core Ultra CPU with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. That powerhouse duo has the chops to tackle demanding AI workflows and AAA gaming alike. For commercial and edge applications, consider the NUC 14 Performance. Capable of powering up to five 4K displays simultaneously, this PC is ideal for professional environments which require nimble AI performance in a multi-monitor setup.
How do I measure an AI PC’s performance?
If you’re looking for a quick and easy measurement to compare the relative performance of one AI PC to another, the answer is TOPS. Short for tera operations per second, TOPS indicates how many trillions of operations your AI PC can perform per second under ideal conditions. Last-gen CPUs offer single-digit TOPS; modern laptop CPUs easily triple that figure just looking at NPU performance alone; and the GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card boasts a jaw-dropping 1321 AI TOPS.
So how many TOPS does your AI PC need? Going by Microsoft’s requirements for a Copilot+ PC, the answer is at least 40 TOPS. But as with any other measure of PC performance, the question ultimately depends on the workloads that matter to you most. If you have a specific AI-accelerated app in mind like Blender, Stable Diffusion, Arnold, Mxnet, or others, we recommend researching benchmark comparisons for that specific application.
How can an AI PC accelerate your gaming?
PC gamers were among the first to boost their experiences with the power of AI. Today, you’ll find a robust set of AI-powered tools that increase the performance and visual fidelity of games, and they’re available in a wide range of today’s most popular games.
NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) uses AI computations to upscale lower-resolution input frames to the native resolution of your display, and the performance benefit can be quite substantial. DLSS 3 with Frame Generation goes even further to generate entirely new frames using the power of AI.
NVIDIA RTX features also let gamers play astonishingly with lifelike visuals at supremely fluid frame rates. One of the latest tools, Ray Reconstruction, is an AI model that allows for higher-quality ray-traced images than ever before.
How can an AI PC boost your creative efforts?
In the large and growing creative community, you’ll find a wide range of content creators who need potent AI PC hardware to efficiently bring their visions to life. Whether you’re a filmmaker, game developer, animator, graphic designer, architect, engineer, photographer, or a product designer, you can’t afford to miss out on the many ways that AI is transforming creative workflows.
- 3D Animation: With cutting-edge hardware – in particular, a discrete laptop GPU or desktop PC with a full-fledged graphics card – you’ll be able to model and render rich virtual worlds at game-changing speeds. AI denoising and tech like DLSS 3 let you preview the results faster so that you can fine-tune and finalize your projects efficiently.
- Image Generation: Generate images faster using Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI on NVIDIA RTX GPUs. One-step RTX-enhanced ControlNets unlock unprecedented workflow control.
- Video Editing and Motion Graphics: Shoot, edit, and deliver faster in 4K, 6K, and even 8K with the dedicated encoders and decoders available with your graphics card accelerating video tasks, and the dedicated AI cores supercharging your AI-powered tools.
- Photography: With the smartphone in your pocket, you can easily capture an image and apply a basic filter. But AI lets you do so much more. The latest AI-powered features in Adobe Photoshop let you expand an image in any direction with Generative Expand, change backgrounds on the fly, remove and replace unwanted elements with ease, upscale images with less noise, and more.
- Architecture: Effortlessly visualize worlds and spaces in stunning reality using GPU-accelerated ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4, Chaos V-Ray and Enscape.
How can an AI PC make you more productive?
The tech that comes with your AI-ready CPU or GPU has wide-ranging benefits even when you’re not gaming or creating. AI can help you look your best in video calls, even in rooms with difficult lighting. Free Windows apps can use AI to accomplish many surprising tasks, like synchronizing subtitles for downloaded video files, creating clean transcriptions of recorded audio, upscale images without loss of detail or pixelation, splice music into separate tracks, and more.
Copilot+ PCs offer an intriguing set of new features to help boost your productivity, creative ambitions, and communication. The headlining feature is Recall, which builds a semantic index entirely on your device so that you can quickly and intuitively access virtually anything you’ve seen or done in the past. New AI features in Paint and Photos will let you bring your ideas to life in no time, and Live Captions will offer translations in real-time.
NVIDIA-exclusive tools make it tempting to select a PC equipped with an RTX 40 Series GPU. With ChatRTX, you can personalize a GPT large language model (LLM) that runs locally on your own PC and connects with your own photos, docs, notes, and other data. RTX Video Super Resolution can take a video stream from platforms like YouTube and Netflix and automatically scale it up to a crystal-clear 4K resolution. NVIDIA Broadcast lets you harness the power of your GPU to deploy AI-enhanced voice and video features when you’re in a video conference – or streaming your gaming experiences online.
More to come
AI has already changed the ways that we game, create, and learn. But there’s so much more on the way. As AI capabilities continue to expand from cloud-based platforms to accelerations built into the PC apps that you rely on the most, it’s going to be more valuable than ever to have a powerful, cutting-edge laptop or desktop PC.
The world of AI is changing quickly, and we’re here to help you stay on top. ASUS laptops, desktops, NUCs, and PC DIY components have what you need to take advantage of the emerging capabilities of AI. If your system doesn’t have the chops to keep up with the latest AI-powered apps and Windows 11 features, it’s time for an upgrade. Whether you’d prefer to build your own PC or hit the ground running with an ASUS NUC or laptop, we have the options you need for an incredible experience.