Dell Technologies World 2024 | Ed Ward | Dell Technologies

Clips
News
More from Dell Technologies World 2024

Ed Ward

President, Client Product Group

Dell Technologies

Transforming personal computing: Dell’s vision for AI-driven PCs

Artificial intelligence in personal computers isn’t an entirely new concept, but as the capabilities of this technology continue to expand, the potential uses of AI in PCs are captivating the attention and imagination of companies such as Dell Technologies Inc.With AI as a workload, AI PCs can securely run AI workloads locally on the device without the need for cloud scaling, requiring nothing but an internet connection, according to Ed Ward (pictured), president of the Client Product Group at Dell.Dell’s Ed Ward talks with theCUBE about AI PCs during Dell Technologies World 2024

play_circle_outline The Practical Benefits of AI-Powered Personal Computers: Enhancing Efficiency for Consumers and Businesses

play_circle_outline Impact of AI PC on saving time and increasing productivity

Info

Ed Ward | Dell Technologies

Ed Ward

President, Client Product Group Dell Technologies

search

>> Good afternoon Dell fans and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada. It is day three of Dell Tech World, and we've still got the energy rolling here on the show. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host and CUBE co-founder, John Furrier. John, what an epic show.

>> Yeah, I love this show. Dell has a great show this year. Everything's pumping on all cylinders. The AI factory all the way to the AI PC and everything in between. AI, it's in Dell's wheelhouse. They're building new systems. That's what they do. They put parts together, they make computers, they make servers, now they make clusters. Now they're building AI factories. And of course, AI PC is the hot topic and we're going to talk about that on this segment.

>> I'm super excited that we get to dig in with a self-proclaimed product person himself. Please welcome Ed Ward. Ed, thank you so much for being here, president of the Client Services Group. You must have had a really busy week.

Ed Ward

>> It's been a little busy. A lot of folks want to talk about AI PCs and it's great.

>> So since this is our first chance to get to do this, and we have our own CUBE AI, we'd love to get your sound bite for this. Can you define what an AI PC is?

Ed Ward

>> Sure. I mean, lots of definitions out there that you know. One that we're comfortable with that we think about is you think about AI as a workload, it's something that's running on the machines. For us, an AI PC is a PC that really has the capability to run that AI workload locally on the device. Not in the cloud. Locally, on the device secure with your data. You may only need an internet connection because those models can be running and really doing inferencing and delivering for you locally on the device. So it's a PC that has the ability to run that workload locally.

>> And a lot of developers run their products on their local host when they do their development. So it's really a natural evolution. What's different between the old PC and the new PC, the AI PC, or what's different?

Ed Ward

>> Sure. I mean, if you think about it, we think about AI. We've been thinking about, we've been shipping tensor cores, which in our workstation products since 2017, and they have the ability to run AI workloads. And so we've been shipping it in our PCs for a while now. What's really different now is the ability to bring AI accelerators forward and things called NPUs, neural processing units, that really are dedicated for that. And now you can get them in nice thin systems like you guys have there that allows you to really bring that capability locally on the device. That's the big thing that's different that now that can flow throughout the entire PC ecosystem from the high end to the mid-range and beyond.

>> So componentry is one big piece.

Ed Ward

>> That's one big piece.

>> Any other changes? Obviously ethernet still big, other components, PCI, any innovations there?

Ed Ward

>> Well, I think obviously it's all about the data and we look at it in terms of bringing the AI to where the data is. So the ability to have a lot of storage there locally on the device and certainly with the announcements we just had with the operating system updates as Microsoft talked about with Copilot Plus and being able to bring that through. So those are items that really is different that you really got the hardware and the software working together to bring a real solution to the PC.

>> Talk about some of the advantages of the AI PC. What is this going to empower your customers to be able to do?

Ed Ward

>> Well, I've got personal history with this myself. I mean, I think about it, what's the one thing everybody does, whether you're a commercial, a business user or a personal user? My wife's like, "Hey, I'm looking for that photo that we took on the vacation. I can't quite remember what folder I shoved it in. Where'd it go?" And the really cool thing in the AI PC is now with some of the capabilities it has, you can simply ask it to find that photo. "Hey, there was a person in there with a red car by a lake." And up pops a few photos, and that's what I was looking for as opposed to really going through it. So that's a real example from consumer-

>> That's a great example.

Ed Ward

>> If you think about it on the business side, I have people that work for me. I'm sure you guys probably do too. And I have to do reviews and get feedback on people, and I take that really seriously. And one of the things is really looking through all of that feedback and trying to get the theme. What's the consistent thread throughout that? That used to take me a long time to read everything and say, "That sounds like this because different words." With AI, I can kind of get a first pass summary of that. Now I don't just take that and make that the review, but it allows me to really quickly get into where do I really need to focus and dig in so I'm giving the right message to my team member. And literally this past year, it cut the amount of time that I had to take to really get to that right message in half.

>> So what I just heard is the AI PC is going to give us time back.

Ed Ward

>> A lot of people talk about the killer app, what is the killer app. And I really think it's giving you time. Now, what you do with the time to be able to turn it into, whether it's productivity at work or doing other things personally, that's up to the person of the business, but it's really giving you some time back, which is the one thing you can't buy or extend.

>> And Warren Buffet said that many times, you can't buy time. So the richness here is the killer app of AI is getting your time back, getting time to do other things. You continue to work on your PC if you want to do that.

Ed Ward

>> If you want to do that. That's absolutely right.

>> Well, the Copilot craze certainly is checking all the boxes, every single event. AI craze. You mentioned before we came on camera last year when you were on the main stage here at Dell Tech world, you said, "AI is a hot word of the day. Now it's every day." The hot word now is Copilot. Giving an assistant to the user. I have it on my Dell machine here. It's a beta. That's going to be more of the same. So more data's coming down to me. How does that roadmap look like when you look at the future of the data requirements? Michael Dell said on stage, "GPUs devour storage." He means it crunches a lot of data. What you need is faster storage.

Ed Ward

>> That's right. And so if you think about it, we think about, look, at the end of the day, like Michael talked about, data is the fuel. It really fuels this, and it's really about bringing the AI to the data. And a lot of the data is generated on the edge locally. So bringing it now down locally where we have that capability to process that data where it's generated real time, so less latency, better security, and you can get the real time insights that you need to really be able to take effect. So I think what you're going to see with the data is a lot of the data that's been created there locally now can now be put to work and be able to do insights and really again, making you more productive, being able to allow you to do more things.

>> Security, you brought up security, I want to circle back real quick because I've heard from customers that I have older machines that they run slow because they have all these agents on there from a cybersecurity standpoint. The boot up time's slower. So two questions. One is how does AI help security piece and then two, what is GenAI going to do to the refresh cycles? Because that's certainly on everyone's mind these days at planning for their economic plans, their business model, how much to spend.

Ed Ward

>> Yeah, let me unpack that. I think there's a couple of questions there. What's it going to do with security? So I talked about latency. If you look at your major vendors, they actually use AI in the cloud because they're trying to say, "Hey, what's happening on the device? I see a threat actor trying to do, so that looks suspicious. Let me go stop that. Instead of trying to remediate it after the effect." Well, there's going to be a certain latency in sending that up to the cloud, being able to get that imprint and then sending back down commands. Now you could actually run that locally on the device. So the minute that shows up, you can really focus in on it, cut it down. Better latency yields better security, and the fact that you're not sending your data up to the cloud. I mean, if you have your own private... 83% of the data as we talked about is on-prem. So if you're a business, your data's on-prem, it's safe and secure, but there may be some that you're sending up to the cloud, but you want to be able to say, "Hey, I want to process it locally, make sure that it's secure, it's not going anywhere." So that's what we think it does from a security standpoint. And if you think about, "Okay, well what's really happening here in terms of refresh cycle?" Well, if you think about it, there's like over 300 million PCs or so out there that were coming up on the Windows 10 to Windows 11 transition. We've had a lot of PCs that were bought during the pandemic that are approaching that four or five year life cycle.

>> My gosh, that's a good point.

Ed Ward

>> There's a lot of PCs out there that are saying, "Hey, it's time to do something different." And now what we've been saying is you want to get a PC that's able to run AI. You may not think, "Okay, well what am I going to do with it, et cetera?"

>> What is AI?

Ed Ward

>> Exactly, exactly. But we're going to be at the forefront now, kind of like it was in the beginning of the PC industry where you're going to see innovations and performance increasing exponentially. Just what we talked about. With the initial AI PCs that we launched in December with consumer. In gaming, in January, and then these products in front of you that you're using in consumer in February, and then our commercial products in March, and now here we are in late May, and we just announced a stream of Copilot plus PCs, even more performant. So that's what you're really going to see. I think the refresh cycle is people are going to be clamoring and really it's... Again, last thing is it's a view of you have to be able to get out there and use it. And if you wait too long, somebody's going to be out there as well.

>> Savannah and I were talking on theCUBE earlier when our first kickoff segment around how the industry changes. It has ebbs and flows one year. It's like, "Don't talk about speeds and feeds. Only talk about solutions." Now we're in a speeds and feeds market now. It's speeds and feeds. We are in past two years, if not three, I'd argue five... But all people care about on the gaming side is who's got the better processor? Who's running what? NVIDIA had gone from gaming to crypto to now AI. You guys worked with them, you've worked with everybody. So what's the speeds and feeds advancement, if you wanted to talk speeds and feeds with us? Give us some speeds and feeds.

Ed Ward

>> Sure. I mean, again, I like to think about it and I'll talk it since you ask, but I like to think about it in terms of varying levels of performance. Again, I've been in the industry for 38 years and seeing how the PC has gone through cycles and early on, you just saw a performance just increasing and as it increased, you could do things you never even thought about. And that's what you're seeing right now. And if you want to get the speeds and feeds version of it, we talked about that neural processing unit that allows you to be able NPU to run locally. Well, last year, not a whole lot of PCs had NPUs in them. There are a few out there. Not very many. And even the ones that did in terms of trillions of operations per second, they're running at not very many. And then we introduced the PCs we have now, running at 12 tops with Meteor Lake. Really being able to... We talked about a customer Deloitte on stage yesterday, how they were running 7 million parameter models on those PCs we have today, able to run that workload locally. And now the Copilot plus PCs with the Snapdragon running at 40 plus tops and then also coming up soon from Intel as well, and AMD. So that's kind of the speeds and feeds, but I really like to think more about performance levels of capability.

>> It's horsepower, getting more horsepower, getting that compute.

Ed Ward

>> Yeah, that's way to think about it.

>> Throughput of the system. It's a systems revolution. That's what we're seeing.

>> Yeah. And you're ramping up big time. Goal is 2 million AI PCs by 2030?

Ed Ward

>> I think it was 2 billion, maybe Jeff said or something like-

>> 2 billion, oh my gosh. Even more....

Ed Ward

>> at 2030 in terms of if you look at it, we-

>> That's a massive market opportunity.

Ed Ward

>> That's a massive market opportunity.

>> That's wild.

>> What's the old expression? Target a big market, go after it.

Ed Ward

>> Excuse me.

>> The old expression, target a big tam, big market. That's a big market right there.

Ed Ward

>> We just want to be able to make sure that we're providing the best capability for our customers wherever they are, be the commercial customers or consumer customers.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think the speeds and feeds really points to what you said, the performance. I think that's the way to think about it, because whether it's a server, cluster of servers, it's coming down to what is the throughput, how much power is being used, energy savings. And when we go to CES and of World Congress, the number one conversation is how do I get to the network latency, low latency network access, what's the battery power look like? What's the power, power and cooling of the service? So all the confluence of these other things are now constraints. As a leader, managing those constraints, like recycling the stuff you have done for years, what are the constraints that you're managing your business around? What is the key areas? Is it power? Is it battery time, energy?

Ed Ward

>> It's all those things. If we think about, you mentioned recycling and we're about three really key things. Simplifying IT for our customers, delighting customers, and also advancing sustainability. I mean, Sam talked about it yesterday. We're the first to use recycled cobalt in our batteries.

>> Which is amazing.

Ed Ward

>> First to use 50% recycled steel in our PCs and on. There were others. Ocean-bound plastics.

>> Even your lovely packaging is all recycled.

Ed Ward

>> Ocean-bound plastics.

>> Right. Which sounds very cool.

Ed Ward

>> Something was bound for the ocean, now we're putting it in packaging and it looks great. The packaging that those products you have-

>> It does. It looks sharp. I noticed. Yeah.

Ed Ward

>> That's right. So for us, it's really about how do we think about this from a circularity standpoint, which means we want to use recycled items, but we also want to make sure that when our PCs get retired, because hey, you need the next new one, that refresh cycle we talked about, that it's easy for us. We take that prior product back. It's easy for people to disassemble and then recycle, and then that's back into the cycle again to build a new one. So that's what we mean when we say design for circularity, and that's really an area that we're looking at from trade-off standpoint.

>> It's clear across the entire business how much that's a goal, which is really... It's exciting, honestly. I'm wondering, okay, how quickly do you think we're going to see adoption of the AI PC?

Ed Ward

>> Well, that's a very good question, I think, and that's the one nobody knows.

>> That's why I'm asking you.

Ed Ward

>> If I had the cube or if I had a real crystal ball, I can tell you. But I think about it this way. I was there at the beginning of the internet when the internet first showed up, and now it's like anybody, if you're a bricklayer, I don't care what you do, you know how to use the internet. But back then it was like, "Well, why do I need to do this?" And then all of a sudden, "Wait a minute, I can do this with it. I can do this with it." And then you have that big boom of PCs in the late nineties, early two thousands. I look at this in a similar fashion as people get their hands on it and they realize, "Hey, I can find those photos faster. Hey, my workflow, instead of sorting emails looking for my boss's email, I can just say, give me the latest emails from my boss and boom, there they show up." As people do that and start experiencing that, I think that's what's really going to drive adoption. As we talk to ISVs, we know they're excited, they're integrating it into their software, and then that's going to allow customers to actually use it. And once you experience it, it's like you can't go back.

>> I think that's a really astute point, and I love your example of the photos because it's simple and digestible. That's a very real and tangible example. We talk about making AI real. We talk about 2024 being one of the years, 2025, when AI becomes real. To what you're saying, AI's not going to be real until it's in your hands, until it's in your PC, until it's in your phone, or whatever else you happen to be operating on. Outside of those very tangible use cases, what gets you personally really thrilled about our AI future?

Ed Ward

>> What gets me really thrilled is just seeing the levels of innovation. I mean, I'm an engineer at heart. I'm a product guy, but I grew up in engineering design products, and I still have a passion for the product and being able to really deliver it to customers and see their faces light up in what they do. And so what gets me excited is that we're just at the beginning. This is just as the preamble of this, which means we're going to continue to see just as we've just seen this year, Copilot in December, now we got Copilot Plus in May. And so you're going to continue to see innovations come in that now our engineers can take a look at our... Product people can take a look and say, "How can I put that together in a way to really solve problems for customers?" And that's exciting. And being able to do that cycle over and over again. That's the flow that it gives me. So that's what I'm excited about.

>> That is I love that there's nothing quite like watching someone interact with something you've created and seeing what they're doing. Is there any surprising use cases? Coming back to the other side of that, you're watching their magic and their joy, has there been any insights from the conversations you've had with customers or people in general that's been really surprising to you about the AI PC?

Ed Ward

>> I think one of the things, I don't know if it's surprising, but maybe it is. One of the things is... And we saw it ourselves as we started working with software developers and you hear all this stuff, "Oh, AI's here." And less people writing code and all these concerns. But what we've actually seen from the engineers is they love it. And if you dig into it's because wow, there's a lot of work they need to do to go get things done, and they want to really work on that part of the work. We all have things that we do that allows us to do the things we really like to do, but you have to do this or else you can't do the thing we really like. And really what was a little surprising was they were finding that, "Oh, we want to use the AI because that gets us away from the pieces that we have to do to do the things we really want to do. Now I can spend more time doing that thing I really like to do." And that's kind of like a little counterintuitive if you think about it, but that's what we're finding. We've heard that from customers as well.

>> I think that's great though. That's increasing the quality of life for everybody. That's a great thing. Ed, this has been an absolutely fantastic interview. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. One final question for you, since we're definitely going to have you back on. When you join us here at Dell Tech World next year, what do you hope to be able to say that you aren't able to say yet?

Ed Ward

>> It is kind of like Jeff said yesterday. It's like, "Well, what are you surprised about?" It's like, "Well, I couldn't have predicted where we are today." We are so at the forefront of this, and of course, we're in our quiet period, so there's things I can't talk about. But I will tell you that the level of innovation I think is just going to continue to surprise us. Whatever I can think about here, I want to be able to say next year, "Wow, I didn't even see that one coming, and now look what we have for you." And that's the thing I look forward to. That's the innovation. That's the piece that really gets the juice flowing.

>> And everyone benefits too.

>> Yeah, that's true. Well, we look forward to having our minds blown with whatever narrative you bring to us next year, and thank you so much for being here.

Ed Ward

>> Thank you.

>> John, always a pleasure hanging out with you. And thank all of you for tuning in to our mind-melding, absolutely fantastic three days of coverage here at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Ed Ward | Dell Technologies

search

>> Good afternoon Dell fans and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada. It is day three of Dell Tech World, and we've still got the energy rolling here on the show. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host and CUBE co-founder, John Furrier. John, what an epic show.

>> Yeah, I love this show. Dell has a great show this year. Everything's pumping on all cylinders. The AI factory all the way to the AI PC and everything in between. AI, it's in Dell's wheelhouse. They're building new systems. That's what they do. They put parts together, they make computers, they make servers, now they make clusters. Now they're building AI factories. And of course, AI PC is the hot topic and we're going to talk about that on this segment.

>> I'm super excited that we get to dig in with a self-proclaimed product person himself. Please welcome Ed Ward. Ed, thank you so much for being here, president of the Client Services Group. You must have had a really busy week.

Ed Ward

>> It's been a little busy. A lot of folks want to talk about AI PCs and it's great.

>> So since this is our first chance to get to do this, and we have our own CUBE AI, we'd love to get your sound bite for this. Can you define what an AI PC is?

Ed Ward

>> Sure. I mean, lots of definitions out there that you know. One that we're comfortable with that we think about is you think about AI as a workload, it's something that's running on the machines. For us, an AI PC is a PC that really has the capability to run that AI workload locally on the device. Not in the cloud. Locally, on the device secure with your data. You may only need an internet connection because those models can be running and really doing inferencing and delivering for you locally on the device. So it's a PC that has the ability to run that workload locally.

>> And a lot of developers run their products on their local host when they do their development. So it's really a natural evolution. What's different between the old PC and the new PC, the AI PC, or what's different?

Ed Ward

>> Sure. I mean, if you think about it, we think about AI. We've been thinking about, we've been shipping tensor cores, which in our workstation products since 2017, and they have the ability to run AI workloads. And so we've been shipping it in our PCs for a while now. What's really different now is the ability to bring AI accelerators forward and things called NPUs, neural processing units, that really are dedicated for that. And now you can get them in nice thin systems like you guys have there that allows you to really bring that capability locally on the device. That's the big thing that's different that now that can flow throughout the entire PC ecosystem from the high end to the mid-range and beyond.

>> So componentry is one big piece.

Ed Ward

>> That's one big piece.

>> Any other changes? Obviously ethernet still big, other components, PCI, any innovations there?

Ed Ward

>> Well, I think obviously it's all about the data and we look at it in terms of bringing the AI to where the data is. So the ability to have a lot of storage there locally on the device and certainly with the announcements we just had with the operating system updates as Microsoft talked about with Copilot Plus and being able to bring that through. So those are items that really is different that you really got the hardware and the software working together to bring a real solution to the PC.

>> Talk about some of the advantages of the AI PC. What is this going to empower your customers to be able to do?

Ed Ward

>> Well, I've got personal history with this myself. I mean, I think about it, what's the one thing everybody does, whether you're a commercial, a business user or a personal user? My wife's like, "Hey, I'm looking for that photo that we took on the vacation. I can't quite remember what folder I shoved it in. Where'd it go?" And the really cool thing in the AI PC is now with some of the capabilities it has, you can simply ask it to find that photo. "Hey, there was a person in there with a red car by a lake." And up pops a few photos, and that's what I was looking for as opposed to really going through it. So that's a real example from consumer-

>> That's a great example.

Ed Ward

>> If you think about it on the business side, I have people that work for me. I'm sure you guys probably do too. And I have to do reviews and get feedback on people, and I take that really seriously. And one of the things is really looking through all of that feedback and trying to get the theme. What's the consistent thread throughout that? That used to take me a long time to read everything and say, "That sounds like this because different words." With AI, I can kind of get a first pass summary of that. Now I don't just take that and make that the review, but it allows me to really quickly get into where do I really need to focus and dig in so I'm giving the right message to my team member. And literally this past year, it cut the amount of time that I had to take to really get to that right message in half.

>> So what I just heard is the AI PC is going to give us time back.

Ed Ward

>> A lot of people talk about the killer app, what is the killer app. And I really think it's giving you time. Now, what you do with the time to be able to turn it into, whether it's productivity at work or doing other things personally, that's up to the person of the business, but it's really giving you some time back, which is the one thing you can't buy or extend.

>> And Warren Buffet said that many times, you can't buy time. So the richness here is the killer app of AI is getting your time back, getting time to do other things. You continue to work on your PC if you want to do that.

Ed Ward

>> If you want to do that. That's absolutely right.

>> Well, the Copilot craze certainly is checking all the boxes, every single event. AI craze. You mentioned before we came on camera last year when you were on the main stage here at Dell Tech world, you said, "AI is a hot word of the day. Now it's every day." The hot word now is Copilot. Giving an assistant to the user. I have it on my Dell machine here. It's a beta. That's going to be more of the same. So more data's coming down to me. How does that roadmap look like when you look at the future of the data requirements? Michael Dell said on stage, "GPUs devour storage." He means it crunches a lot of data. What you need is faster storage.

Ed Ward

>> That's right. And so if you think about it, we think about, look, at the end of the day, like Michael talked about, data is the fuel. It really fuels this, and it's really about bringing the AI to the data. And a lot of the data is generated on the edge locally. So bringing it now down locally where we have that capability to process that data where it's generated real time, so less latency, better security, and you can get the real time insights that you need to really be able to take effect. So I think what you're going to see with the data is a lot of the data that's been created there locally now can now be put to work and be able to do insights and really again, making you more productive, being able to allow you to do more things.

>> Security, you brought up security, I want to circle back real quick because I've heard from customers that I have older machines that they run slow because they have all these agents on there from a cybersecurity standpoint. The boot up time's slower. So two questions. One is how does AI help security piece and then two, what is GenAI going to do to the refresh cycles? Because that's certainly on everyone's mind these days at planning for their economic plans, their business model, how much to spend.

Ed Ward

>> Yeah, let me unpack that. I think there's a couple of questions there. What's it going to do with security? So I talked about latency. If you look at your major vendors, they actually use AI in the cloud because they're trying to say, "Hey, what's happening on the device? I see a threat actor trying to do, so that looks suspicious. Let me go stop that. Instead of trying to remediate it after the effect." Well, there's going to be a certain latency in sending that up to the cloud, being able to get that imprint and then sending back down commands. Now you could actually run that locally on the device. So the minute that shows up, you can really focus in on it, cut it down. Better latency yields better security, and the fact that you're not sending your data up to the cloud. I mean, if you have your own private... 83% of the data as we talked about is on-prem. So if you're a business, your data's on-prem, it's safe and secure, but there may be some that you're sending up to the cloud, but you want to be able to say, "Hey, I want to process it locally, make sure that it's secure, it's not going anywhere." So that's what we think it does from a security standpoint. And if you think about, "Okay, well what's really happening here in terms of refresh cycle?" Well, if you think about it, there's like over 300 million PCs or so out there that were coming up on the Windows 10 to Windows 11 transition. We've had a lot of PCs that were bought during the pandemic that are approaching that four or five year life cycle.

>> My gosh, that's a good point.

Ed Ward

>> There's a lot of PCs out there that are saying, "Hey, it's time to do something different." And now what we've been saying is you want to get a PC that's able to run AI. You may not think, "Okay, well what am I going to do with it, et cetera?"

>> What is AI?

Ed Ward

>> Exactly, exactly. But we're going to be at the forefront now, kind of like it was in the beginning of the PC industry where you're going to see innovations and performance increasing exponentially. Just what we talked about. With the initial AI PCs that we launched in December with consumer. In gaming, in January, and then these products in front of you that you're using in consumer in February, and then our commercial products in March, and now here we are in late May, and we just announced a stream of Copilot plus PCs, even more performant. So that's what you're really going to see. I think the refresh cycle is people are going to be clamoring and really it's... Again, last thing is it's a view of you have to be able to get out there and use it. And if you wait too long, somebody's going to be out there as well.

>> Savannah and I were talking on theCUBE earlier when our first kickoff segment around how the industry changes. It has ebbs and flows one year. It's like, "Don't talk about speeds and feeds. Only talk about solutions." Now we're in a speeds and feeds market now. It's speeds and feeds. We are in past two years, if not three, I'd argue five... But all people care about on the gaming side is who's got the better processor? Who's running what? NVIDIA had gone from gaming to crypto to now AI. You guys worked with them, you've worked with everybody. So what's the speeds and feeds advancement, if you wanted to talk speeds and feeds with us? Give us some speeds and feeds.

Ed Ward

>> Sure. I mean, again, I like to think about it and I'll talk it since you ask, but I like to think about it in terms of varying levels of performance. Again, I've been in the industry for 38 years and seeing how the PC has gone through cycles and early on, you just saw a performance just increasing and as it increased, you could do things you never even thought about. And that's what you're seeing right now. And if you want to get the speeds and feeds version of it, we talked about that neural processing unit that allows you to be able NPU to run locally. Well, last year, not a whole lot of PCs had NPUs in them. There are a few out there. Not very many. And even the ones that did in terms of trillions of operations per second, they're running at not very many. And then we introduced the PCs we have now, running at 12 tops with Meteor Lake. Really being able to... We talked about a customer Deloitte on stage yesterday, how they were running 7 million parameter models on those PCs we have today, able to run that workload locally. And now the Copilot plus PCs with the Snapdragon running at 40 plus tops and then also coming up soon from Intel as well, and AMD. So that's kind of the speeds and feeds, but I really like to think more about performance levels of capability.

>> It's horsepower, getting more horsepower, getting that compute.

Ed Ward

>> Yeah, that's way to think about it.

>> Throughput of the system. It's a systems revolution. That's what we're seeing.

>> Yeah. And you're ramping up big time. Goal is 2 million AI PCs by 2030?

Ed Ward

>> I think it was 2 billion, maybe Jeff said or something like-

>> 2 billion, oh my gosh. Even more....

Ed Ward

>> at 2030 in terms of if you look at it, we-

>> That's a massive market opportunity.

Ed Ward

>> That's a massive market opportunity.

>> That's wild.

>> What's the old expression? Target a big market, go after it.

Ed Ward

>> Excuse me.

>> The old expression, target a big tam, big market. That's a big market right there.

Ed Ward

>> We just want to be able to make sure that we're providing the best capability for our customers wherever they are, be the commercial customers or consumer customers.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think the speeds and feeds really points to what you said, the performance. I think that's the way to think about it, because whether it's a server, cluster of servers, it's coming down to what is the throughput, how much power is being used, energy savings. And when we go to CES and of World Congress, the number one conversation is how do I get to the network latency, low latency network access, what's the battery power look like? What's the power, power and cooling of the service? So all the confluence of these other things are now constraints. As a leader, managing those constraints, like recycling the stuff you have done for years, what are the constraints that you're managing your business around? What is the key areas? Is it power? Is it battery time, energy?

Ed Ward

>> It's all those things. If we think about, you mentioned recycling and we're about three really key things. Simplifying IT for our customers, delighting customers, and also advancing sustainability. I mean, Sam talked about it yesterday. We're the first to use recycled cobalt in our batteries.

>> Which is amazing.

Ed Ward

>> First to use 50% recycled steel in our PCs and on. There were others. Ocean-bound plastics.

>> Even your lovely packaging is all recycled.

Ed Ward

>> Ocean-bound plastics.

>> Right. Which sounds very cool.

Ed Ward

>> Something was bound for the ocean, now we're putting it in packaging and it looks great. The packaging that those products you have-

>> It does. It looks sharp. I noticed. Yeah.

Ed Ward

>> That's right. So for us, it's really about how do we think about this from a circularity standpoint, which means we want to use recycled items, but we also want to make sure that when our PCs get retired, because hey, you need the next new one, that refresh cycle we talked about, that it's easy for us. We take that prior product back. It's easy for people to disassemble and then recycle, and then that's back into the cycle again to build a new one. So that's what we mean when we say design for circularity, and that's really an area that we're looking at from trade-off standpoint.

>> It's clear across the entire business how much that's a goal, which is really... It's exciting, honestly. I'm wondering, okay, how quickly do you think we're going to see adoption of the AI PC?

Ed Ward

>> Well, that's a very good question, I think, and that's the one nobody knows.

>> That's why I'm asking you.

Ed Ward

>> If I had the cube or if I had a real crystal ball, I can tell you. But I think about it this way. I was there at the beginning of the internet when the internet first showed up, and now it's like anybody, if you're a bricklayer, I don't care what you do, you know how to use the internet. But back then it was like, "Well, why do I need to do this?" And then all of a sudden, "Wait a minute, I can do this with it. I can do this with it." And then you have that big boom of PCs in the late nineties, early two thousands. I look at this in a similar fashion as people get their hands on it and they realize, "Hey, I can find those photos faster. Hey, my workflow, instead of sorting emails looking for my boss's email, I can just say, give me the latest emails from my boss and boom, there they show up." As people do that and start experiencing that, I think that's what's really going to drive adoption. As we talk to ISVs, we know they're excited, they're integrating it into their software, and then that's going to allow customers to actually use it. And once you experience it, it's like you can't go back.

>> I think that's a really astute point, and I love your example of the photos because it's simple and digestible. That's a very real and tangible example. We talk about making AI real. We talk about 2024 being one of the years, 2025, when AI becomes real. To what you're saying, AI's not going to be real until it's in your hands, until it's in your PC, until it's in your phone, or whatever else you happen to be operating on. Outside of those very tangible use cases, what gets you personally really thrilled about our AI future?

Ed Ward

>> What gets me really thrilled is just seeing the levels of innovation. I mean, I'm an engineer at heart. I'm a product guy, but I grew up in engineering design products, and I still have a passion for the product and being able to really deliver it to customers and see their faces light up in what they do. And so what gets me excited is that we're just at the beginning. This is just as the preamble of this, which means we're going to continue to see just as we've just seen this year, Copilot in December, now we got Copilot Plus in May. And so you're going to continue to see innovations come in that now our engineers can take a look at our... Product people can take a look and say, "How can I put that together in a way to really solve problems for customers?" And that's exciting. And being able to do that cycle over and over again. That's the flow that it gives me. So that's what I'm excited about.

>> That is I love that there's nothing quite like watching someone interact with something you've created and seeing what they're doing. Is there any surprising use cases? Coming back to the other side of that, you're watching their magic and their joy, has there been any insights from the conversations you've had with customers or people in general that's been really surprising to you about the AI PC?

Ed Ward

>> I think one of the things, I don't know if it's surprising, but maybe it is. One of the things is... And we saw it ourselves as we started working with software developers and you hear all this stuff, "Oh, AI's here." And less people writing code and all these concerns. But what we've actually seen from the engineers is they love it. And if you dig into it's because wow, there's a lot of work they need to do to go get things done, and they want to really work on that part of the work. We all have things that we do that allows us to do the things we really like to do, but you have to do this or else you can't do the thing we really like. And really what was a little surprising was they were finding that, "Oh, we want to use the AI because that gets us away from the pieces that we have to do to do the things we really want to do. Now I can spend more time doing that thing I really like to do." And that's kind of like a little counterintuitive if you think about it, but that's what we're finding. We've heard that from customers as well.

>> I think that's great though. That's increasing the quality of life for everybody. That's a great thing. Ed, this has been an absolutely fantastic interview. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. One final question for you, since we're definitely going to have you back on. When you join us here at Dell Tech World next year, what do you hope to be able to say that you aren't able to say yet?

Ed Ward

>> It is kind of like Jeff said yesterday. It's like, "Well, what are you surprised about?" It's like, "Well, I couldn't have predicted where we are today." We are so at the forefront of this, and of course, we're in our quiet period, so there's things I can't talk about. But I will tell you that the level of innovation I think is just going to continue to surprise us. Whatever I can think about here, I want to be able to say next year, "Wow, I didn't even see that one coming, and now look what we have for you." And that's the thing I look forward to. That's the innovation. That's the piece that really gets the juice flowing.

>> And everyone benefits too.

>> Yeah, that's true. Well, we look forward to having our minds blown with whatever narrative you bring to us next year, and thank you so much for being here.

Ed Ward

>> Thank you.

>> John, always a pleasure hanging out with you. And thank all of you for tuning in to our mind-melding, absolutely fantastic three days of coverage here at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.