The AI PC era: Dell brings models to the edge – News

Artificial intelligence is going to get more personalized, accessible and close-to-home with the rise of the AI personal computer, or AI PC.

Dell Technologies Inc.’s strategy is to help companies bring models to edge devices, while deploying at scale. The ultimate goal is a holistic AI system where customers can have the models they need, wherever they need them.

“We’ve gone all in on AI; we’re putting it into our devices,” said Sam Burd (pictured), president of the Client Solutions Group at Dell. “It’s basically accelerators that are sitting next to the CPU, so you can think about that as enabling the apps that we use every day to be more intelligent. Then for our commercial customers, the most exciting piece to me is they’re going to be able to take their data generated at the edge on their devices, their PCs and run their AI models on those devices.”

Burd spoke with theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson for the Dell Bets Big on AI PCs at CES 2025 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Dell is spearheading the AI PC era. (* Disclosure below.)

The AI PC: Taking models to devices

Dell has had AI on their PCs for a long time, but now it is even more fully integrated into their devices, according to Burd. These include the Pro monitor for professional grade products, Dell Pro Max, which offers maximum performance, and Alienware Area 51 gaming PCs.

The Dell Pro Max 14 (Photo: Dell)

“We have this age-old debate of the cart before the horse, software before hardware,” Burd said. “We’re enabling it in our hardware. We are really leaned in on having the best stuff for our customers, and you’re seeing the software in the ISV community start to really take advantage of that in their applications.”

Dell has also invested in cooling technology, which puts more power into their CPUs while producing less sound. Neural processing units — specialized hardware designed for AI — can save companies time and energy across their entire business, Burd explained.

“We’re in the corporate environment, and there’s a lot of security apps running in that space,” he said. “When you can run them on the NPU, you can do more and you don’t impact battery life and system performance, so that really matters to the users. Same thing in creativity applications … things like background blur and other things in collaboration apps to drawing and rendering.”

High-powered products for creative work tend to have a faster life cycle, and having different life cycles for different groups of products is only natural, Burd noted. The Dell AI Pro Studio is designed to give companies the tools to deploy AI models on their devices at a massive or smaller, specialized scale.

“The PC is the ultimate place for you, I and others to have agents running that are helping us in our lives,” he said. “We’re trying to make it easy for our customers to put their models on devices, and then I think it’s anyone’s guess is as good as mine, but we’ve seen AI move so quickly … we’re enabling it with our technology for customers on systems that’ll be shipping next year.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Dell Bets Big on AI PCs at CES 2025 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Dell Bets Big on AI PCs at CES 2025 event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News