Troubled Chipzilla is pushing the AI PC story hard, and it reckons Panther Lake will shove it into half of upcoming PCs.
Panther Lake’s headline trick is a big AI uplift, thanks to fifth-generation NPUs rated at up to 50 TOPS, which Chipzilla hopes will make on-device AI feel less like a party trick.
Intel Japan, CEO, Makoto Ohno said: “It is predicted that by 2026, this will exceed half, with one in two computers being an AI PC. However, given the current situation, the reasons for choosing an AI PC include its high performance and the long battery life enabled by an NPU. In other words, it is important to reflect on the fact that people are not currently purchasing an AI PC in order to use its AI-related functions.”
That rings true because most client workloads are not gagging for local inference, and plenty of what passes for AI on PCs is still vendor fluff and bundled software.
PC makers are trying anyway, with Lenovo pushing AI services such as Qira that follow you across PCs, phones and wearables, while the hardware pitch leans on more compute at the edge.
Ohno said: “I want to quickly bring AI PCs to the point where they become the standard for PCs. At the moment, they are seen as high-end PC models, but we need to quickly create a situation where AI PCs are considered “normal.” We also want to increase the number of AI apps that can take advantage of the capabilities of AI PCs, and create a situation where people will buy an AI PC because they want to use AI.”
The problem is that consumers still see “AI PC” as a gimmick, but Panther Lake is being positioned as the spec-sheet push that makes it harder to ignore.
