IFA, the Berlin electronics fair that has run since 1924 and once launched the television and the cassette, opened on Friday for five days with a single theme on every stand: the AI PC. Lenovo, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, Acer, Asus and Dell are all selling laptops built around a chip that most buyers had not heard of a year ago, the NPU.
What an NPU is
A CPU does everything adequately; a GPU does graphics and parallel maths quickly. A neural processing unit is a third block on the chip designed for one thing — the matrix multiplication at the heart of neural networks — and does it using a fraction of the power a CPU or GPU would need. That is what lets a laptop blur a video-call background, transcribe a meeting, translate captions or run a small language model on battery, without sending anything to the cloud. Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC label requires an NPU of at least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second); the chips at IFA all clear it.
Intel: Lunar Lake
Intel has spent a year being embarrassed on battery life by AMD and, since June, by Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X, which delivered MacBook-like endurance on Windows. Its answer is Core Ultra 200V, code-named Lunar Lake: memory on the chip package, a redesigned low-power core, a 48-TOPS NPU and, Intel claims, up to 20 hours of battery — with the advantage that, unlike Snapdragon, it runs every existing Windows program natively. Lenovo, Acer, Dell, Asus, HP and Samsung all announced Lunar Lake laptops in Berlin, shipping from 24 September.
Qualcomm: a cheaper Snapdragon
Qualcomm, which owns the phone-chip market and entered laptops in earnest this year, launched the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core, a smaller version of its chip aimed at laptops around $700–900 rather than $1,000-plus. The same 45-TOPS NPU, fewer CPU cores, same battery story. The catch is unchanged: software written for Intel runs through an emulator, and some — older games, specialist engineering tools, many printers’ drivers — does not run at all.
Lenovo and the rest
Lenovo, the largest PC maker by volume, showed Aura Edition laptops built with Intel: thin, long-lived, with an AI “smart share” link to phones and modes for focus and eye care. Its Auto Twist AI PC concept rotates its screen into tablet mode on a voice command and is not for sale. Acer showed Project DualPlay, a gaming laptop with a detachable controller hidden in the trackpad.
Do you need one?
Not yet, for most people. The NPU features that exist — background blur, Studio Effects, Recall when it eventually ships, live captions — are conveniences, and the AI that matters to most users still runs in the cloud. Buy an AI PC in Dhaka this year for the battery life and the thinness, which are real, and treat the NPU as a bet on software that has not been written. If a laptop must run old accounting software or a lab instrument, choose Intel or AMD over Snapdragon, whatever the battery claims.
Source: Indian Express, via Prothom Alo.
