Data shared by Canalys, relayed by TechRadarhighlight some of the rough edges of the current PC market. They show that until now, the era of “PC AI” is still far from having arrived. In addition, they confirm that computers armed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series processor benefit from media coverage much higher than their representativeness.
Few AI PCs, and even fewer PCs with Snapdragon
Let’s get straight to the heart of the matter. The publication reports that during the third quarter of 2024, 13.3 million AI PCs (a term which includes computers whose processor incorporates an NPU of at least 40 TOPS; a processing unit designed to manage workloads AI and present, with such processing power, within the Lunar Lake, Ryzen AI 300 and Snapdragon over the period. Prosaically, it’s just one PC in five.
Concerning Qualcomm’s Snapdragon As our colleagues point out in their title, 0.8% of PDM is equivalent to one computer in… 125. We understand better why after having wanted laptops from 700 dollars, Qualcomm is preparing another Snapdragon chip capable of lowering it to 600 dollars this entry ticket… To qualify, let’s point out that despite the progress made, the Arm architecture does not always work well with Windows in certain applications.
Of course, this market is starting from very low. As a result, quarter-on-quarter growth is high. Thus, looking only at total shipments of Windows PCs, shipments of NPU-armed machines increased by 93% sequentially (by 49% when taking into account all OSes). That said, they still accounted for only 12% of all Windows PCs shipped in the third quarter.
Windows goes AI
As a result, for the first time, Microsoft took the leadership of this market in the third quarter of 2024: Windows computers accounted for 53% of the total volume, the rest being macOS systems. In the second quarter, the latter still dominated with a ratio of 59/41.
These figures confirm one thing: customers are far from rushing to computers branded as PC AI. Roughly speaking, based on other reports, it appears that there is no real demand for such systems at the moment.
Additional features that will be added via Copilot+ (or soon Windows Intelligence) will perhaps attract other customers in the long term. However, many analysis firms stipulate that the main driver of the progression of these AI PCs will be… the abandonment of Windows 10, implemented for October 2025. Indeed, this decision will constrain a good number of users whose machine does not does not meet Windows 11 requirements to purchase a new one; the offer will then include numerous AI PCs. And too bad for the many systems still perfectly operational which will be arbitrarily scrapped (some 240,000 million computers according to a Canalys study published in December 2023).
???? To not miss any news from 01net, follow us on Google News and WhatsApp.
Source :
TechRadar
