The annual Mobile World Congress trade show, as the name suggests, is normally a telco and handset-driven event, and this year’s event in Barcelona last week was no exception. Even though vendors that we associate with PCs like Intel, AMD, and Dell had on-site booths as well, they were more focused on telco and data center opportunities rather than PCs.
That doesn’t mean that there weren’t significant PC market developments though. Indeed, last year we saw Intel launching the vPro version of its Meteor Lake processors at MWC, and this year we saw vPro for Arrow Lake being unveiled under the Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) name. At first glance this might seem just like an uneventful annual cadence, but we think the industry is underappreciating how significant this development is for moving the PC industry toward on-device AI.
The reality is that many commercial PCs leverage Intel vPro, as well as the AMD equivalent more recently. This is not just because of the product-level features catering to IT departments around manageability and security, but also because PC OEMs like HP, Dell, and Lenovo create commercial PC product lines based on vPro. More than half of the total PC market is driven by the commercial sector rather than consumers, so Intel’s release of the vPro version of its latest processor is key to adoption as a whole. And hey, it has an NPU for on-device AI workloads.
Granted, what businesses will do with those NPUs is still up for debate. Use cases so far have been limited, and delays and confusion around Microsoft Copilot+ PC features haven’t helped either. (Frankly, we think offloading system tray tasks to the NPU for the sake of power efficiency and longer battery life is not talked about enough, but to be honest, it is not the sexiest topic.) Eventually the use cases will come, as long as the other big hurdle of security is assured. In the meantime, NPUs are shipping for software developers to take advantage of, and the installed base of AI PCs is growing. Chicken, meet the egg.
Software, by the way, is where Intel has an advantage. This is in two forms. First, it is in terms of how much Intel has embraced and invested in developers to take advantage of its silicon, with its AI PC Acceleration Program helping ISVs to leverage not just the NPU, but also the GPU and CPU. More significant though is the assurance of existing applications being compatible with its silicon. As much as Qualcomm and Microsoft deserve big credit for getting a significant number of applications natively deployed on ARM (while also offering a well-praised emulator as a workaround), corporate images have deeper system-level software like anti-virus, VPN, remote desktop, backup, and possibly accessory drivers that may not all be ported over yet. And this inertia keeps Intel moving among commercial buyers.
The point either way is that NPUs are shipping, even if these Arrow Lake systems feature a less powerful 13 TOPS NPU compared to competing >40 TOPS parts including not just Intel’s own Lunar Lake platform, but also those from AMD and Qualcomm, the latter of which incidentally can reach much lower price points than Intel. Intel’s new vPro Fleet Services are also encouraging. It is an Intel-hosted SaaS that makes it easier for IT departments without on-premise servers to activate vPro’s Active Management Technology (AMT), which recently garnered huge success stories for organizations who got back on their feet quickly during last year’s Crowdstrike “Blue Friday” incident due to AMT usage. Intel separately launched its Assured Supply Chain program, which is very timely given today’s uncertain geopolitical and tariff-clouded environment.
Speaking of Qualcomm, there were no new Snapdragon X announcements at MWC, but their booth showcased a Lunar Lake-based Surface Laptop for Business alongside one using its own Snapdragon X Elite to illustrate performance differences when unplugged on battery power. It was a message that we’d seen from them already but was now demonstrated live with a fresh Lunar Lake-based Surface Laptop that only just started shipping recently. Qualcomm’s strengths on battery are indeed a competitive advantage that deserves more attention.
Finally, one can’t do justice to talking about PCs at MWC without mentioning Lenovo. Its presence at the show catered to the telco segment via its infrastructure business group as well as its Motorola lineage, but a significant portion of its booth was dedicated to its PCs too. That included not just refreshed Think and Yoga product lines, but also its wide range of concepts, including an outward-folding notebook, secondary-screen attachments, solar-powered backpanels, and 3D screens. Even if they were just concepts, Lenovo got the message out about its ability to innovate.
One item from Lenovo that didn’t seem to get much media coverage but that we were particularly fascinated by was Lenovo’s use of discrete NPUs in peripherals like monitors. In one concept that Lenovo showed, it not only allowed the (motorized) monitor to follow its user’s movements when needed, but more importantly, allowed a non-NPU notebook to use the dNPU in the monitor. It was just a proof of concept, so the ease of developers to access that has yet to be proven. But that NPU installed base nonetheless stands to increase as the industry thinks more in this direction.
