Dell Technologies, later this year, will make available a mobile workstation that incorporates neural processing units (NPUs) from Qualcomm that are designed to enable data scientists and application developers to run 100 billion-parameter models locally.
Announced at Dell Technologies World, the Dell Pro Max Plus mobile workstation, configured with a Qualcomm AI 100 PC Inference Card and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, provides access to 32 AI-cores, up to 256GB RAM and 16TB storage.
The goal is to provide data scientists and application developers with a platform that is capable enough to build AI applications without having to access external IT infrastructure, says Jon Siegal, senior vice president of product marketing for Dell.
For example, a data scientist could run an instance of Meta Llama 4 on a Dell Pro Max Plus mobile workstation, he adds. “This is orders of magnitude more than could even be supported a year ago,” says Siegal.
According to The Futurum Group, the global QoQ of AI PC adoption between the third and fourth quarter of 2024 grew 13.5% in the commercial segment and 7.2% in the consumer segment. Laptops dominate the AI PCs market with $8.04 billion, capturing 67.8% of the total market share, compared to desktops account for $1.92 billion, representing 16.2% of the market. Workstations, in contrast, contributed $1.89 billion, making up 16.0% of the total share.
The medium-priced segment, ranging from $1,000 to $2,000, dominates the AI PC market with a combined value of $6.60 billion, accounting for 55.7% of total sales. High-end models priced greater than $2000 contribute $2.95 billion, or 24.9% of the market, while entry-level models priced at less than $1,000 represent $2.29 billion, comprising 19.4% of total sales, according to The Futurum Group.
More than 90% of revenue from AI PC shipments in the fourth quarter came from AI PCs capable of running fewer than 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) on the NPU. The Dell Pro Max Plus mobile workstation is expected to deliver roughly 350 TOPs.
Overall, Lenovo led the AI PC market in the fourth quarter, with 22.8% market share, followed by HP, Inc. (17.9%) and Dell (14.8%), respectively. Apple and Samsung rounded out the top five, with 14% and 12.6% respectively.
Dell is clearly betting that there will be demand for mobile workstations driven primarily for data scientists and other AI professionals who need to be able to experiment with AI models on a platform they can easily take anywhere.
It’s not clear how much those platforms might cost, but even when they are not provided by an internal IT team, many AI professionals will be able to fund acquiring one on their own if need be.
Regardless of how data scientists and other AI professionals acquire a mobile workstation, the one certain thing is that there are going to be a lot more of them in the months ahead that internal IT teams will be expected to support. The challenge will be deciding between when a desktop workstation may be required versus a laptop, but if most AI professionals have any say in the matter, it may wind up being both, given the rate at which AI models continue to expand in size.
