Nvidia took major strides on Sunday as it announced several new products and services for artificial intelligence (AI) innovations for desktops. It unveiled its RTX AI Toolkit for developers to build apps and experiences on its platform and also gave a tech demo for Project G-Assist, an AI assistant with gaming knowledge. The company also teased the moniker ‘RTX AI PC’ for the upcoming gaming laptops by Asus and MSI, highlighting that it will bring Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs features to these devices.
Nvidia’s push for RTX AI PCs
In a blog post, Nvidia stated, “Newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities. These Windows 11 AI PCs will receive a free update to Copilot+ PC experiences when available.” While the company did not detail what constitutes an RTX AI PC, it did highlight several AI accelerations its GPU platforms will enable for laptops that will be launched throughout the year.
It also claimed that these laptops will get Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC features via a free update “when available”. The wording suggests that the gaming laptops will not receive features such as Recall and Cocreate at launch, but might be upgraded later. Additionally, according to a report by The Verge, these laptops will run on AMD’s latest Strix CPUs.
This distinction is appropriate given Microsoft announced its collaboration with Snapdragon for its Arm-based chipsets with much fanfare during its Build event. It is likely that for a certain duration, the company will keep these features exclusive to the Snapdragon chipsets which run AI tasks using integrated Neural Processing Units (NPUs).
During the announcements, Nvidia also highlighted that GPUs are better suited for running heavier AI workloads compared to NPUs. The comparison is likely based on information shared by Microsoft that its in-house NPUs can handle 50 Trillion operations per second (TOPS). Comparatively, Nvidia GPUs are said to handle up to 1,000 TOPS. One downside of GPUs, however, is that they consume more power whereas NPUs are optimised for performance.
The gaming laptops from Asus and MSI are expected to be available in July as RTX AI PCs, but it is unclear when they might get upgraded to the Copilot+ PCs category.
