HP Launches AI PCs

HP is poised to unleash its new AI-enhanced notebooks and tech guru PAT PILCHER got a close look at them at the Australasian launch.

HP has launched its new AI-friendly PC lineup, which is aimed at making using AI quicker, more battery-friendly and smoother to run. With AI now supplanting blockchain as the thing that is officially bigger than huge in the IT world, HP’s AI friendly hardware launch is the first of its kind in Australasia, giving them first-mover advantage as a rapidly growing number of PC users seek to make use of the huge amount of creativity, productivity and fun on offer with AI.

The launch saw new HP notebook PCs covering the gamut of their entire portfolio, with each range of notebook PCs designed with a particular audience in mind.

Take the HP Spectre X360 lineup, for example. It comes with either Intel Core Ultra 5 and 7 processors or AMD Ryzen PRO processors, both of which are optimised for AI apps. This is due to both brands of silicon incorporating NPUs (Neural Processing Units), which are designed to accelerate AI tasks, offloading the AI compute burden from the CPU. In non-geek-speak, this translates into faster and more responsive AI performance, improved battery life and less heat.

HP’s Pavilion range also uses what HP calls HP Smart Sense, which is designed to adjust to your PC usage patterns to deliver the optimal performance and power consumption balance. As with the Spectre range, Pavilion PCs also come equipped with AI engines that can take over AI processing and offer optimised performance, mobility, and quality.

HP’s ZBook Power G11 comes with all the AI goodies but is squarely aimed at power users and can feature NVIDIA® RTX™ 3000 Ada Laptop GPU or NVIDIA’s latest RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPUs. The ZBook Firefly G11 has an NVIDIA RTX A500 Laptop GPU and, according to HP, will deliver remarkably long battery life (your mileage will vary depending on what you’re using it for, but it should, in theory, keep on keeping on for a good chunk of most long haul flights).

AI aside, the new PCs are very, very grunty. The HP Spectre x360 14-inch and 16-inch 2-in1 laptops/tablets seem to be aimed at the work-at-home crowd as well as road warriors thanks to their integrated 9-megapixel camera, which packs low light adjustment for clear calls at any time of the day or night, plus a dedicated AI silicon for security features such as detecting when the user walks away (which sees the PC locking and reawakening when the user approaches the PC). A clever security bit takes the form of privacy alerts when the camera’s AI detects other people snooping at your laptop’s screen. Audio is tuned by HP subsidiary Poly. Three dedicated processing engines (a CPU, GPU and NPU) mean that demanding apps and games should go much more smoothly. Add to this a 2.8K OLED screen for sharp and super vivid images via IMAX Enhanced Certification and gamers are well catered for. If that wasn’t enough, the displays can intelligently adjust from 48Hz to 120Hz depending on what the PC is used for, allowing for silky smooth gameplay or a vastly reduced drain on laptop batteries.

On the networking front, 802.11axe Wi-FI is baked in (which can deliver super-fast multi-gigabit speeds using the 6GHz band) along with 2.5Gbps LAN ports. HP will also include Wi-Fi 7 in selected models, providing even greater Wi-Fi throughput and futureproofing.

The new HP PCs are attractive, super slim, and made of premium materials for their chassis. HP has also used between 50% and 75% PCR plastic in parts such as screen bezels and keycaps, giving their new range some environmental cred, too.