Dell announces a new Pro Max Plus workstation. This device might be worthy of the AI PC name, as it features a Qualcomm NPU with 64 GB of RAM onboard.
Dell Technologies launches a new Pro Max Plus laptop. The fact that Dell has adapted its laptop naming to buzzword bingo doesn’t make it easy to see the qualities of this new device at a glance. However, the Dell Pro Max Plus Mobile Workstation is a unique device, as it’s the first in the market to have the discrete Qualcomm AI 100 NPU onboard.
Almost all laptop and processor manufacturers have been proclaiming for over a year that the era of the AI PC has arrived. To justify this, they include a tiny NPU as a chiplet with the CPU. This can then accelerate some modest AI tasks, such as background blurring in Teams. Such a thing doesn’t have much use, as it’s far too small to run real AI models that perform at the level of, for example, ChatGPT.
read also
Dell Unveils First Workstation with Qualcomm AI 100 NPU
The Qualcomm AI 100 is a discrete NPU and is many times more powerful than such a built-in chiplet. The NPU has 64 GB of LPDDR4x onboard, which is available to 32 dedicated AI cores. With this, the NPU can load and execute complete AI models on the laptop itself.
Real AI PC
Dell, like its competitors, has hollowed out the term AI PC before it was truly applicable. This is unfortunate, as this new Workstation would be worthy of the name. Dell combines the NPU with an Arrow Lake processor from Intel, which will likely also have a (redundant) NPU onboard. The laptop will be available in the second half of 2025. Further details are still lacking at this time.
Moreover, while the Dell Pro Max Plus Mobile Workstation is the first with a discrete Qualcomm NPU onboard, it’s not the first device optimized for AI. For instance, AMD launched its Max Pro chips (bingo again!) earlier this year. These combine CPU and AI-optimized GPU on a single chip with up to 128 GB of RAM, of which 96 can be allocated to the GPU chiplet. The chip can thus efficiently load and execute complete AI models.
The HP Zbook Ultra G1a has such a chip onboard and is currently being tested at the ITdaily editorial office. This device also fulfills the promise of local AI, and is thus a direct competitor to Dell’s new laptop.