Microsoft has announced its guidelines for smart laptops before these devices hit the market.
At CES 2024, major manufacturers of laptops and desktop computers unveiled their new range of devices expected to reach the market soon.
Most of these devices were laptops featuring modern chips from AMD or Intel, claiming to have artificial intelligence capabilities.
According to a TrendForce report, Microsoft now states that smart devices must have a minimum of 16GB of RAM to feature artificial intelligence capabilities.
This move is expected to increase people’s desire for larger amounts of RAM, while simultaneously reducing the popularity of devices with 8GB of RAM.
This is part of a broader trend where artificial intelligence applications have reached end-user devices and are no longer limited to large servers only.
The global smart server market is expected to grow by over 1.6 million units, with a growth rate of around 40 percent.
AI devices require a minimum of 40 trillion operations per second to be sufficiently powerful.
This has led to fierce competition among semiconductor companies producing computer chips.
Currently, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip is the only one capable of performing 45 trillion operations per second, meeting the requirements.
Intel’s Meteor Lake and AMD’s Ryzen 8040 chips face challenges in this area, while Ryzen 8050 and Lunar Lake chips are expected to meet the requirements.
Qualcomm followed Microsoft’s instructions early on, putting them in a good position to sell their products, using laptops – the only devices running Windows and featuring AI capabilities – with the Snapdragon X Elite processor.
Major companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo plan to produce products based on Qualcomm processors.
Microsoft’s regulations also impact the quality of the RAM technology used, extending their effects to computer hardware companies using LPDDR5x RAM instead of DDR SO-DIMM. This choice is crucial due to its data transfer speed and importance in artificial intelligence.
TrendForce expects around 35 percent of computer RAM demand to be for LPDDR, a percentage that is expected to rise with the increasing demand for AI-equipped computers.
