Artificial intelligence is disrupting the computing industry so much that Dell decided to completely revise its nomenclature earlier this year. The American firm took advantage of CES in Las Vegas to announce the end of its historic brands (Inspiron, Latitude, and XPS) in favor of new brands: Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. The latter refers to machines designed for "maximum performance," and Computex 2025 is the opportunity to unveil new laptops, or rather, real workstations.
Dell's latest product is called Pro Max Plus, and this name obviously recalls the nomenclature used by Apple for the iPhone. But don't let this rather curious choice fool you, because the American manufacturer is going all out... and we expected no less from a Pro Max Plus product.
While the name is questionable (and it is!), Dell's ambition is not
At the heart of Dell's new powerhouses are two Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 chips that form a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). More precisely, it's an inference card equipped with two AI-100 chips. For the uninitiated, an NPU is a processor specialized in intensive calculations of artificial intelligence.
While the most recent consumer PCs, equipped with AMD, Intel or Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, fluctuate between 45 and 50 TOPS (trillion operations per second), the Dell Pro Max Plus configuration aims 350 TOPS. That's nearly nine times the power of Copilot+ PCs in a machine meant for professionals who need to run complex AI models locally, notes The Verge.
That's certainly not yet the level of an entry-level Nvidia Blackwell RTX 5060 GPU (which reaches 614 TOPS), but the crucial advantage of this dedicated NPU is its much lower power consumption compared to a traditional graphics card when it comes to AI tasks. And this is where Dell is taking a radical turn.
AI before GPU: a bold bet
On this Pro Max Plus workstation, the dedicated graphics card disappears in favor of the Qualcomm NPU, optimized for AI model inference. Dell is betting everything on neural computing power, potentially marking a turning point in workstation design where the ability to process AI takes precedence over traditional raw graphics power. As mentioned previously, the goal is to allow professionals (AI engineers, data scientists, chatbot developers, etc.) to locally run language models with up to 109 billion parameters. This approach drastically reduces reliance on the cloud, and the benefits are numerous: increased security for sensitive data that no longer leaves the company, reduced infrastructure costs, and the ability to prototype or deploy AI applications anywhere, even on the go.
To support this AI power, the Dell Pro Max Plus will feature the latest Intel Arrow Lake processors, up to 256GB of system memory (DRAM), and up to 16TB of SSD storage. 4K or QHD+ OLED displays in 16- and 18-inch formats are also on the menu.
The “Dell Pro Max Plus,” or whatever its final nickname is, is shaping up to be a potentially revolutionary tool for AI professionals, ushering in a new era of high-performance embedded AI. Final details about this machine, starting with its price and availability date, remain to be known. In the meantime, the debate over its name is probably not over... and we are already expecting a possible "Pro Max Plus Ultra Premium".
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