r/pcmasterrace • u/After_Cookies • 3d ago
News/Article AI was supposed to sell PCs. Instead, PC shipments just crashed 20% as AI eats the world’s RAM, and Windows 11’s Copilot agents aren’t convincing buyers
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/10/11/ai-was-supposed-to-sell-pcs-instead-pc-shipments-just-crashed-20-as-ai-eats-the-worlds-ram-and-windows-11s-copilot-agents-arent-convincing-buyers/
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 3d ago edited 3d ago
Copilot+ was a scam.
The devices had no performance to run AI. The NPUs built into these were designed years ago for tasks like noise cancelling, deleting backgrounds off Teams video calls etc. - and doing that with more power efficient hardware instead of a GPU, to extend battery life of laptops doing these things.
In order to market the hardware when it was finally ready to ship, they rebranded it as "AI acceleration", which was just close enough to be true so they couldn't be sued over it, but the compute capabilities of the NPUs are such that they are useless for LLMs and other generative AI jobs. The GPU present on the same chip is always better - just uses more power for the tasks - and even they are woefully underpowered. But marketing had to come up with something to sell these crap SoCs that finally came out of the oven.
The only chip last year that was (accidentally) somewhat relevant was the AMD Ryzen AI MAX 395+ with 128GB unified RAM and enough of a GPU that it could run something relevant. This was intended to be a small volume experiment in doing a SoC similar to what Apple is doing, but with x86, and see if it could be sold. That's why it is so hard to find hardware based on it - it was never intended to be a high volume product, and with the RAMpocalypse, the price of these configs went to the moon. We'll see if the new AI MAX 495+ respin (refresh with RAM capabilities bumped up to max 192GB) will have higher volumes - probably yes - but even it is quite underpowered for local AI from compute and memory bandwidth.
NVIDIA RTX Spark is similar design, but Arm-based. Sadly it had its teething pains and is very late. It should have shipped an year ago - and it did in Linux form (DGX Spark) but I guess it took an year for Microsoft and other laptop manufacturers to get the stuff working on Windows on Arm. It is similar barely-useful AI computer (if bought with 128GB unified RAM) but also underpowered and slow - but infinitely more useful than the laughable Copilot+ jank they tried to push.
I would expect even better AI-first stuff will ship in 1-2 year timeframe that will get local AI models to run better, mostly aiming at high end corporate use, marketed as "save on your ballooning token costs with cloud AI, just buy the hardware and run the AI locally". Remains to be seen if they can get the performance and the memory capacities to a level where they can actually compete with cloud AI. The hardware requirements for running modern high end (closed source) models is still quite insane. Also since hardware advances so fast, by the time you got your money's worth out of the system running local AI (vs. paying for cloud usage), it will be woefully outdated.
Medium term the marketing angle will be "Hybrid AI", as seen on the Microsoft event around the new Surfaces with RTX Spark. Run the agentic orchestrator on your "AI computer" locally, it runs local models for overseeing the AI agents, deciding what stuff is doable on the local hardware (easy tasks) while tossing all the hard stuff over to the Cloud. This is likely to be the model for the next few years as local hardware just can't do the stuff cloud AI can (with high end model and plenty of resources, ie. NOT the crap free accont Claude or Copilot that has been super nerfed to save money that you may have tried...)