Recently, I have shared a lot of revelations about the next generation of processors from Intel and AMD. One of the biggest changes and one of the most noteworthy points is that both manufacturers will have built-in AI computing units into consumer-grade processors in the future.
There is also a related news that Microsoft's next-generation Windows 12 operating system will be refactored with artificial intelligence. Previously, there have been rumors that Microsoft's "next-generation" operating system refers to Windows 12, which will be released in June this year.
However, some time ago, Microsoft's official website released an article that clearly stated that Windows 11 24H2 will be released within the year, without mentioning Windows 12. Therefore, the chances that Microsoft will release the Windows 12 operating system within the year are slim and almost non-existent. Still, Windows 11 24H2 is rumored to be adding a plethora of AI-related features as well.
Judging from the currently known indications, around 2025 will be the first year of the popularization of artificial intelligence in consumer-grade computing devices, whether it is the processor or the operating system, it will be reconstructed by artificial intelligence.
Seeing this, some friends may have some degree of doubt in their hearts: Are these gimmicks concocted and hyped up by manufacturers? Is it really practical? Including myself, I also had such doubts before.
But now, I would like to tell you very seriously and responsibly: these are not gimmicks, and it will not be long before the majority of computer users can actually experience and perceive them.
When it comes to Windows Task Manager, computer users are very familiar with it, in this small program that comes with the system, users can intuitively see the real-time usage of hardware resources including processors, memory, hard disks, network cards and graphics cards.
The main types of hardware displayed by Windows Task Manager are the above, however, this situation will finally change greatly in the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 this year, and a new kind of hardware resource usage statistics monitoring information will be added, which is the artificial intelligence computing unit NPU.
AMD recently confirmed the news, saying that it is working with Microsoft to implement the above features. By using the Compute Driver Model (MCDM) interface, the Windows 11 operating system will be able to monitor AMD's xDNA NPU usage and related information, including power usage, and more.
AMD said that adding NPU usage monitoring to Microsoft's Windows operating system task manager is important for the future to make software development easier and improve user device optimization, such as maximizing battery life.
Despite this, AMD is still lagging behind its old rival Intel in this regard, and Intel's processors with integrated NPU units already support the feature, see the image above.
At present, artificial intelligence applications are roughly divided into two categories, one is very large-scale and requires extremely high computing power, and such projects are generally deployed in dedicated data centers and equipped with massive artificial intelligence computing cards.
The other is a lightweight AI application that can be deployed on the user's local computer, such as Chat with RTX released by NVIDIA a few days ago, see the figure above.
Users can submit various files to the app, Chat with RTX can automatically analyze and organize the data modeling in the files, and then users can ask questions to them through natural language chat, query relevant results, and use the experience similar to ChatGPT and Wenxin Yiyan.
This kind of artificial intelligence application does not have high requirements for hardware computing power, so it is not a gimmick for consumer-grade computing devices to be equipped with artificial intelligence computing units in the future, and it has considerable practical value, and it is still in the early stage of development, and there are infinite possibilities in the future.
In general, consumer processors will be equipped with artificial intelligence processor units, and NPU usage monitoring will also be added to the Windows operating system task manager, which basically marks the beginning of artificial intelligence in consumer computing devices, and this situation will become a reality around 2025.