As of late 2025, the Artificial Intelligence PC has shifted from marketing term to default standard, with AI-capable shipments now accounting for nearly 40% of the global market. At the center of this change is the neural processing unit, which is designed to run generative Artificial Intelligence workloads locally rather than in the cloud. What began with Qualcomm’s early 2024 push has escalated into a three-way battle among Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel, as x86 faces fresh pressure from ARM designs and each vendor races to maximize TOPS performance while still delivering a 20-hour battery life.
Qualcomm is pushing an efficiency-first, mobile-derived approach, highlighted by the Snapdragon X2 Elite built on a 3nm process. The X2 Elite’s Hexagon NPU has jumped to a staggering 80 TOPS, nearly doubling the performance of the first-generation chips that launched the Copilot+ era, and the Oryon Gen 3 cores help laptops often exceeding 22 hours of real-world productivity. AMD is betting on total platform muscle: mainstream Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point and Krackan Point stay at 50 NPU TOPS, but the Ryzen AI Max 300 pairs a 40-unit RDNA 3.5 GPU with XDNA 2 so creators can run models like Llama 3 70B entirely on a laptop. Intel’s pivot to its Intel 18A node underpins Panther Lake, where NPU 5 delivers 50 TOPS of dedicated Artificial Intelligence performance and, combined with the Xe3 Celestial GPU, reaches a Total Platform TOPS of 180, reinforcing Intel’s enterprise footprint and x86 compatibility.
This silicon contest is reshaping the wider ecosystem, from Microsoft’s Windows Artificial Intelligence Foundry to OEM lineups from Dell, HP, and Lenovo that mix Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel parts instead of defaulting to Wintel. Dell’s 2025 XPS family, for example, now follows a tri-platform strategy, while Qualcomm’s 25% share in the consumer laptop segment marks a historic ARM-on-Windows breakthrough. Integrated NPUs are also chipping away at low-to-mid-range discrete GPUs as users rely on Artificial Intelligence-accelerated integrated graphics for creative workloads, even as NVIDIA maintains its data center and high-end GPU lead. The broader move to local and edge Artificial Intelligence is enabling sovereign Artificial Intelligence workloads, cutting cloud dependence and energy use, but it is also exposing a new digital divide between Artificial Intelligence PCs and legacy systems and raising doubts about TOPS as a true measure of real-world performance.
Looking toward 2026 and beyond, the market is bracing for NVIDIA’s rumored entry into PC CPUs via a MediaTek-backed ARM SoC, with reports of an internally dubbed N1X pairing Blackwell graphics and high-performance cores, although production hurdles have reportedly pushed the commercial launch to late 2026. The industry is already eyeing the 100-TOPS NPU as the next milestone, with experts predicting that by 2027 the NPU will be capable of running fully multimodal Artificial Intelligence agents that interact with the operating system in real time with zero latency. The competitive phase between Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel has effectively ended the era of the passive PC and opened a chapter in Artificial Intelligence history focused on the democratization of generative Artificial Intelligence, with attention now shifting from raw hardware specifications to the practical utility of NPU-native software and the potential disruption from NVIDIA’s arrival.
