Dell's latest laptop triples down on AI with a discrete NPU

1 month ago 3

Angled rear view of the Dell Pro Max Plus with a picture of an office in the background

AI has been at the forefront of every tech company's press release and product, but Dell is taking things a step further with its latest laptop. The Dell Pro Max Plus was announced today, and it's the first mobile workstation ever to feature a discrete NPU.

Dell is going all-in on AI

Laptops with discrete NPUs aren't entirely new, but the last time you probably heard of them was when Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop Studio 2, which featured the Intel Movidius VPU (before the industry settled on the NPU denomination). That was a terrible AI processor, though. This time, Dell is going all-in.

The main selling point of the new Dell Pro Max Plus is the Qualcomm AI 100 inference card, which Dell says includes two AI 100 cards for a total of 32 AI cores and 64GB of on-board memory, which is separated from the main RAM of the system. This allows the Dell Pro Max Plus to handle Large language Models with up to 109 billion parameters.

This also makes the Dell Pro Max Plus the first-ever mobile workstation to ship with an enterprise-grade discrete NPU. For the most part, laptops have been focusing on integrated NPUs on the same package as the CPU, while leveraging the GPU for more intensive AI workloads. However, having a discrete NPU is unique and should prove useful for AI developers.

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That's all we know

If you don't think the discrete AI processor is exciting enough, you're out of luck with today's announcement, as Dell's press release and spec sheet includes no other information in terms of specs. We don't know what the CPU is or if there's still a discrete GPU considering the extra space taken by the discrete NPU.

From looking at the official press images, though, you can still see the laptop is about as thick as you'd expect a mobile workstation to be, so this won't be a lightweight machine. It's also worth noting that the Plus designation here should mean we're looking at one of Dell's mid to upper range workstations, something in line with the old Precision 5000 or 7000 series.

We also don't know of a release date or pricing, so there's still time for the company to reveal more details.