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Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

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Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#391

Post by [deleted] »

hallmason17 wrote: post #52
microflash wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.

Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are…

[deleted]

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#392

Post by trympet »

microflash wrote: post #45
ishtanbul wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7 processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy, but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hou…

After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.

While I appreciate the build quality and ruggedness of the thinkpads, I’d take the bigger trackpad and better screen of the XPS/precision any day. Or, maybe my employer screwed me by giving a shitty thinkpad SKU (it has a 1080p TN panel ffs)..

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#393

Post by trympet »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #316
leptons wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait for all the data center fire-sales when the whole "AI" boom goes bust. Ebay is going to be flooded with tech.

> I can't wait for all the data center fire-sales when the whole "AI" boom goes bust. Ebay is going to be flooded with tech. I think a lot of the hardware of these "AI" servers will rather get re-purposes for more "ordinary" cloud applications. So I don't think your scenario will happen.

Yep, hyperscalers go on and on about the "fungible" datacenter capacity in their earning calls as a hedge for a sudden decrease in demand. I could see a scenario where there would be an abundance of GPU capacity, but I’m sure we’d find uses for those too. For instance, there are classic data retrieval workloads that can be accelerated using GPUs.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#394

Post by michaelcampbell »

jorvi wrote: post #56
yalogin wrote: post #27

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time.…

The only thing Apple is behind on in the AI race is LLMs. They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone noise suppression, etc. iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.

> had these features 2-5 years before Android did.

"first" isn't always more important than "best". Apple has historically been ok with not being first, as long as it was either best or very obviously "much better". It always, well, USED TO focus on best. It has lost its way in that lately.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#395

Post by m463 »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #186
jorvi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing Apple is behind on in the AI race is LLMs. They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone noise suppression, etc. iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.

Apple’s AI powered image editor (like removing something from the background) is near unusable. Samsung’s is near magic, Google’s seems great. So there’s a big gap here.

> unusable

apple is so hit or miss.

I think the image ocr is great and usable. I can take a picture of a phone number and dial it.

but trying to edit a text field is such a nightmare.

(try to change "this if good" to "this is good" on iphone with your fingers is non-apple cumbersome)

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#396

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kube-system wrote: post #288
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? You can replace the ROM chip (or flash it, if it's an EEPROM). The whole point of free software is that you don't have to limit yourself to what the manufacturer says you can do.

I was responding to: > Any computer running nonfree software can't be a personal one

Now that I understand it, this is an excellent point.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#398

Post by scrame »

nextaccountic wrote: post #387
TitaRusell wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people who are actually paying good money for a PC nowadays are gamers- and they sure as hell aren't paying 3k so that they can use copilot.

Also professionals that need powerful computers ("workstations") in their jobs, like video editing A lot of them are incorporating AI in their workflow, so making local AI better would be a plus. Unfortunately I don't see this happening unless GPUs come with more VRAM (and AI companies don't want that, and are willing to spend top dollar to hoard RAM)

Assuming you can buy GPU's at a reasonable price.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#399

Post by cookiengineer »

imtringued wrote: post #366
cookiengineer wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is: Isn't this exactly what SIMD has done before? Well, or SSE2 instructions? To me, an NPU and how it's described just looks like a pretty shitty and useless FPGA that any alternative FPGA from Xilinx could easily replace.

Yes but your CPUs have energy inefficient things like caches and out of order execution that do not help with fixed workloads like matrix multiplication. AMD gives you 32 AI Engines in the space of 3 regular Ryzen cores with full cache, where each AI Engine is more powerful than a Ryzen core for matrix multiplication.

I thought SSE2 and everything that came after like AVX 512 or SSE4 were made for streaming, leveraging the cache only for direct access to speed things up?

Haven't used SSE instructions for anything other than fiddling around with it yet, so I don't know if I'm wrong in this assumption. I understand the lock state argument about cores due to always max 2 cores being able to access the same cache/memory... but doesn't this have to be identical for FPUs if we compare this with SIMD + AVX?

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#400

Post by kristianp »

adastra22 wrote: post #311
krooj wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question - from the perspective of the actual silicon, are these NPUs just another form of SIMD? If so, that's laughable sleight of hand and the circuits will be relegated to some mothball footnote in the same manner as AVX512, etc. To be fair, SIMD made a massive difference for early multimedia PCs for things like music playback, gaming, and composited UIs.

> circuits will be relegated to some mothball footnote in the same manner as AVX512 AVX512 is widely used...

Not on Intel consumer CPUs.
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