Nvidia took big steps on Sunday when it announced several new products and services for artificial intelligence (AI) innovations for the desktop. It showcased its RTX AI Toolkit for developers to build apps and experiences on its platform, and also gave a technology demo for Project G-Assist, an AI assistant with gaming knowledge. The company also teased an ‘RTX AI PC’ moniker for upcoming gaming laptops from Asus and MSI, emphasizing that they will bring Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC features to the devices.
Nvidia’s push for RTX AI PCs
In a blog post, Nvidia stated: “The newly announced RTX AI PC notebooks from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and energy-efficient systems-on-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities. These Windows 11 PCs with AI will receive a free update to Copilot+ PC experiences when available.” While the company didn’t detail what makes up an RTX AI computer, it did highlight several AI accelerations that its GPU platforms will enable for laptops that will launch later this year.
He also claimed that these laptops will get Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC features via a free update “when available”. The text suggests that gaming laptops won’t get features like Recall and Cocreate at launch, but could be upgraded later. Additionally, according to a report by The Verge, these laptops will run on AMD’s latest Strix CPUs.
This distinction is fitting given that Microsoft announced its collaboration with Snapdragon for its Arm-based chipsets to great fanfare during its Build event. It’s likely that the company will keep these features exclusive to Snapdragon chipsets that run AI tasks using integrated neural processing units (NPUs) for a while.
During the announcement, Nvidia also emphasized that GPUs are better suited to running larger AI workloads compared to NPUs. The comparison is likely based on information shared by Microsoft that its internal NPUs can handle 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). In comparison, Nvidia GPUs are said to handle up to 1000 TOPS. However, one downside of GPUs is that they consume more power, while NPUs are optimized for performance.
Gaming laptops from Asus and MSI are expected to be available in July as RTX AI PCs, but it’s unclear when they might be upgraded to the Copilot+ PC category.
