Most PC Enthusiasts Say They Won’t Pay More for AI Features: Poll

Now that the era of the AI PC has finally arrived, PC enthusiasts are starting to wonder when this new phenomenon might begin to encroach on their turf. So far, all of the officially branded AI PCs have been midrange laptops, leading many to wonder when it’ll also begin to metastasize to the realm of the desktop PC. When that happens, as it seems inevitable, most PC enthusiasts in a new poll say they would not be willing to pay more for hardware with AI features.

The poll was conducted in the forums for TechPowerUp, and it got a lot of engagement, with a whopping 26,357 respondents as of this writing. The poll, flagged by Videocardz, asked, “Would you pay more for hardware with AI capabilities?” The results could not be more one-sided, with 84% voting “no” and just 7.64% saying they would be willing to pay more. The remaining 8.6% say they don’t know, which is fair since nobody knows what it really means yet, given the paucity of AI features included in Copilot+ PCs.

Most PC enthusiasts are either not interested in paying for hardware that supports AI at this point, but it’ll be interesting to come back to this poll in a few years.
Credit: Techpowerup forums

The poll results show what seems like a glaring “enthusiasm gap” for AI features on the PC—at least among PC enthusiasts with beefy gaming rigs. PC makers of all stripes are fully onboard with the AI hype train, as it’s touted as the biggest revolution in computing since the invention of hardware rendering for graphics.

The two paradigm shifts are similar; AI applications are powered by neural processing units (NPU), hardware now beginning to appear in next-gen CPUs to run AI features. But NPUs are still notably absent in the majority of desktop CPUs. People have said that just like how we use GPUs to run graphics, we will eventually all be using NPUs to run AI.

So far, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm are going hard on the NPU angle for their upcoming mobile processors. It remains to be seen how relevant it will be for their desktop chips. For example, AMD’s recently announced Zen 5 desktop CPUs don’t have NPUs, but it’s rumored that Intel’s next-generation Arrow Lake desktops will offer an NPU, albeit with only 13 TOPS of performance. For context, AMD’s mobile NPU in Zen 5 offers 50 TOPS, and Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile CPUs claim 48 TOPS, so the one in Arrow Lake is not powerful enough to do much. However, those systems will typically have a discrete GPU capable of hundreds of TOPS, making the one in the CPU largely irrelevant.