Dell’s New Pro Max 16 Plus: A Mobile Powerhouse Unveiling New AI Possibilities

Dell has commenced the delivery of the Pro Max 16 Plus laptop, which offers surprisingly high NPU performance. The figure mentioned is approximately an order of magnitude higher than that of the best contemporary AMD or Intel APUs. The secret lies in a discrete NPU chip within this laptop. It’s the Qualcomm Cloud AI-100 Ultra. These are so-called accelerators that Qualcomm launched back in 2020. Technically, it may well be an entirely different chip now, but understanding that is tricky. Regardless, we are talking about a chip inside the laptop.

It’s crucial to note that Dell itself does not specify the chip’s performance, and the 870 TOPS information is taken from Qualcomm’s website, though this is still for a standalone accelerator with a power limit of 150W. It is very likely that its performance in a laptop is lower. More intriguingly, this NPU features 64GB of its own dedicated memory. The laptop is generally aimed at delivering data center-level output right on the workstation device.

Dell claims this is the first mobile workstation with a discrete corporate-class neural processor, providing performance, accuracy, and consistency at a data-center level in a portable device.

Regarding other parameters, it is based on the Intel Core Ultra 200HX processors up to the top-of-the-line Ultra 9. There is 32 or 64 GB of RAM, an SSD with a capacity from 512 GB, and professional Nvidia cards up to the RTX Pro 3000 Blackwell. Prices start at $3730.