Your Next Windows PC Will Most Likely Have 16GB RAM, Due To AI Demands

Your Next Windows PC Will Most Likely Have 16GB RAM, Due To AI Demands

Remember the days when budget laptops and PCs came with a paltry 4GB DDR4 RAM some five years ago? It was a common complaint among users that OEMs often skimp on memory, and it took quite some time before the 8GB became the new status quo.

Now, as AI has become the hottest thing in the tech world while Microsoft is taking every way it can to make sure its AI plans truly stick, the company is reportedly raising the standard to 16GB in order to meet the demands of local AI processing, according to Tom’s Hardware. TrendForce seemed to agree with the publication’s sources, and both have reported that Microsoft is also mandating a certain level of performance to classify any PC as an “AI PC”.

That should be good news for everyone, as the company’s focus on AI has inadvertently made this a happy accident. The same standard also demands the AI PC to be capable of 40 TOPS of AI compute performance, which means any device officially labeled as an AI PC should come with a pretty solid level of performance right away – no strings attached. However, you might still find ultra-budget systems that won’t come with such capabilities.

Currently, Intel’s Meteor Lake chips fall short of that number at 34 TOPS (Lunar Lake is expected to triple that). Meanwhile, AMD’s Ryzen 8040 series “Hawk Point” provides up to 16 TOPS via its XDNA-based NPU. Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoCs are said to deliver around 45 TOPS – and the same applies to Team Red’s Ryzen 8050 series “Strix Point” chips. All things considered – the laptops and PCs in 2025 should come with healthy amounts of RAM available, which, aside from benefitting local AI compute, helps with multitasking, too.

Pokdepinion: That should hopefully make the lack of RAM a thing of the past for any decently performing laptops.