New Delhi: Dell has introduced the new Dell Pro Max 16 Plus, a laptop with a discrete enterprise-grade NP, the Qualcomm AI 100 PC Inference Card. The laptop features a dual-NPU architecture with a  pair of AI 100 NPUs on a single card with 64GB of dedicated AI memory, allowing for sustained, high-fidelity on-device inferencing. The laptop delivers datacentre-class inferencing on-device. The laptop allows for running complex, large-scale AI models directly on the device, without being connected to the cloud. While the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs have been leveraged for AI for training AI models, inferencing, or executing the trained models requires sustained performance, predictable latency and uncompromising accuracy, which is where NPUs come in.

The Qualcomm AI 100 PC Inference Card is purpose-built for inferencing at scale, allowing users to run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters directly on the laptop. This allows for realtime results without roundtrips to the cloud, which is suitable for time-critical workloads. It is possible to inference in disconnected, air-gapped environments without sacrificing on performance. The on-device inferencing capability also benefits data-sensitive use cases, where the data is not transmitted to the cloud. This is an edge server in a backpack.

Clinicians in rural and remote clinics can analyse medical imagery directly on the device in limited connectivity connections, including inferencing from MRI or CT scans. The hardware allows for running predictive models for financial and legal analysts, and sensitive transcriptions. Both of the above use cases benefit from the security offered by on-device AI, and are compliant with privacy regulations. AI developers can also benchmark and validate their models locally. For robotics and computer vision applications, engineers can process feeds from live sensors and enable realtime decision loops, which is essential for autonomous systems, smart factories and field maintenance. Security and speed are the two major benefits.