Intel's AI PC Chips Aren't Selling Well (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0177140883
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/25/1844209/intels-ai-pc-chips-arent-selling-well
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-ai-pc-chips-arent-selling-instead-last-gen-raptor-lake-booms-and-creates-a-shortage
This surprising trend, first reported by Tom's Hardware, has created a production capacity shortage for Intel's 'Intel 7' process node that will "persist for the foreseeable future," despite the fact that current-generation chips utilize TSMC's newer nodes. "Customers are demanding system price points that consumers really want," explained Intel executive Michelle Johnston Holthaus, noting that economic concerns and tariffs have affected inventory decisions.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-ai-pc-chips-arent-selling-instead-last-gen-raptor-lake-booms-and-creates-a-shortage
Gave All The Profit To The Suits. (Score:1)
Instead of the engineers and then they left and now you are crying about making shitty parts. Classic greedy crybabies.
It's ok. (Score:2)
Intel is requiring employees to be in the office 4 days a week. That will surely fix this problem.
(Note: this is sarcasm)
The main issue is the hybrid architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
The efficiency cores need to be disabled anyway if you do any virtualization, so they are a waste of space on the die that could be used by something doing actual work. At best, they artificially inflate the marketing specs.
Re: (Score:2)
They're quite nice when you're trying to be, you know, energy efficient... I quite like 'em for battery life.
The NPU seems much more useless to me, other than slightly improving greenscreen functionality I have no idea what to use it for.
Do consumers care about AI? (Score:2)
The elephant in the room is that none of these companies that are betting their futures on "AI"—whatever they mean by that—has yet to prove that consumers are interested. Last I heard, Apple Intelligence wasn't exactly driving up iPhone sales figures, either. They say the new MacBook Pros have it, too ... great?
I was at Best Buy the other day, and I saw an electric toothbrush that claimed to clean your teeth with AI. It cost $360. Does anybody buy this stuff? Even as gifts? I just can't see how
Because most people couldn't care less? (Score:3)
It would really be interesting to know what percentage of users are excited about any of the so-called features that these AI chips will enable. Sure, if your work hangs off the side of big tech you might care about it whether you need to or not (I personally always buy more powerful machines than I actually require), but outside of an extreme minority of users I do not believe that anyone cares about any of this. Personally, for my own work, I do not really see what benefit I will ever gain from any of these tools running on my own local machine. I manage cloud based systems that I work with through a web interface. I code in those platforms over web based interfaces or over terminals. I do not need local AI for my work. For my personal use, cloud based services are also fine.
What would you use one for? (Score:2)
Does Intel really believe end-users will be running or developing AI models on their laptops/desktops? Because while I'd like to have a 5.6 GHz CPU, the likelihood of a non-developer building or running a model on their desktop is between slim and none.
And if you are developing or running an AI model, why wouldn't you buy the higher-performing NVIDIA GPUs?
There really isn't any end-user case for running AI models.
Re: (Score:2)
> the likelihood of a non-developer building or running a model on their desktop is between slim and none
Bizarre conclusion. Non-developers will be running local models as soon as these models are incorporated into pre-installed, easy-to-use consumer software. Privacy is a major driver.
Re: What would you use one for? (Score:2)
The use case is privacy. Lots of companies are never going to let their employees paste corporate data into a third party website. Move that execution to the local machine, and a bunch of new use cases open up.
Somewhat unexpected. (Score:2)
The part of this that is genuinely a bit surprising isn't that nobody cares about glorious 'copilot+' NPU AI PC whatever; but that Intel is apparently having a hard time selling people on the actual improvement between raptor lake and meteor lake; which is the battery life.
Performance was basically a wash; but that's the generation where Intel significantly improved the efficiency situation.
Uhm, ChatGPT is a website (Score:3)
Why would a normal person need an AI chip on their local computer to talk with an online chatbot?
These AI PCs are destined to flop. It's the hardware maker's marketing team preying on the AI-everything media frenzy.
Re: (Score:2)
ChatGPT is a website
No it isn't, but there's an instance of ChatGTP hosted on the company's website.
Re: (Score:2)
Equally, why would you need a Copilot key, a shiny Macbook, flared jeans ?
Fashion.
I always like to pass on v1.0 tech (Score:2)
> Why would a normal person need an AI chip on their local computer to talk with an online chatbot? These AI PCs are destined to flop. It's the hardware maker's marketing team preying on the AI-everything media frenzy.
The focus on chatbots and such is marketing BS. However in reality, having ML support in the CPU is actually useful. For example, I've seen even the modest ML support on an Apple Watch allows some speech analysis to happen onboard the watch, not having to be sent to a cloud server for processing. So in theory Ultra chips could lead to greater privacy.
I want to stress, greater privacy, "IN THEORY". The "Recall" spyware non-sense completely undermines such hopes.
So I'm leaning towards passing on Ultra C
Re: (Score:1)
ChatGPT recommended to me to avoid the AI chips and buy the previous generations. The AI npu's are too weak, or too overpriced to be economical. You are better off having a GPU with tensor cores, and an older pre NPU - CPU that is faster and cheaper.