HP’s CES 2024 Laptops with Intel Core Ultra

For HP, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is mostly about adding the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with the new Intel Core Ultra CPU chipsets to a good variety of their laptop models. There are some other new design changes and accessories to show off too, but the big thing here is that the NPU will allow these computers to run artificial intelligence models more efficiently right on the computer without having to send data over the internet to cloud-based AI models. Most of the offline AI model functions can be used offline with just a regular CPU and GPU, but the new NPU is specifically designed for it, thus improving efficiency and performance.

Intel Core Ultra NPU

First off, above, we’ve got a special AI plug-in made for the open-source “GNU Image Manipulation Program“. The OpenVINO AI plugins enable offline AI image generation right within the graphics program. You’ve got Super-Resolution, Style-Transfer, Inpainting, Semantic-Segmentation, and Stable Diffusion support and it all works with Intel’s new NPU. Stable Diffusion is the one that can generate art from text prompts of course and it’s extremely cool. Also, all of this software is open-source and free in case you don’t want to pay for Adobe’s subscription fee.

We’ve also got AI video editing software that works with the NPU chip. While Adobe Premiere Beta has some support for this as well, you might want to check out WonderShare Filmora instead. Filmora is also free and includes some NPU artificial intelligence features already. You can automatically mask motion objects; no need for green screen chroma keying. You can automatically reframe and crop a video for different aspect ratios while keeping all the action in frame, and you can do a few other things like automatically cutting out silent pauses, stretching audio, or removing noise.

The AI features that will probably be most widely used are the ones related to video conferencing. HP’s new laptops with NPU chips also have camera driver software that makes use of the NPU for driver-level effects that can be used in any video conferencing or camera software. With the NPU AI chip, the video call camera can add a background filter in real-time, change your eyes so it looks like you’re looking at the camera, and fix the lighting.

The camera can also be used for other AI-related functions like walk away lock, wake on approach, privacy alert, and dimming when you look away to save power.

Which HP computers will have the Intel Core Ultra NPU?

As of January 2024, you can expect to see the Intel Core Ultra NPU in the latest versions of the following systems, which will be released in the first half of the year:

• HP Spectre x360 14-inch
• HP Spectre x360 16-inch
• HP Pavillion Plus 16-inch
• HP Pavillion Plus 14-inch
• HP 15.6-inch
• HP 14-inch
• HP 27-inch All-in-One
• HP 23.8-inch All-in-One
• HP OMEN Transcend 14-inch Gaming Laptop

HP OMEN Transcend Gaming Laptop

Speaking of the HP OMEN brand, there’s a new Gaming Laptop in town, too.

The OMEN Transcend 14 is the world’s lightest 14″ gaming laptop. It’s only 1637g at

313 (W) x 233.5 (D) x 17.99 (H) mm. It will have either Intel Core Ultra 9 185H or Ultra 7 155H with 16 or 32Gb RAM and 512Gb, 1Tb, or 2Tb NVMe SSD storage. You can also get an NVIDIA RTX 4050, 4060, or 4070 GPU.

A big design difference that you’ll notice with the new OMEN Transcend 14 is the keyboard backlight. Of course it has animated programmable RGB LED lights for the backlight, but the new thing here is the shape of the keys with a large translucent edge to each key in the gaps between keys. Whereas other models may only have the key label backlight, the OMEN Transcend 14 has all of the gaps lit up.

Miscellaneous

At CES, HP is also showing a lot of new accessories as well as some impressive PCs that have already previously been announced.

We’ve seen the HP Spectre Foldable PC before, but it’s worth seeing again with that awesome foldable screen and detachable keyboard.

The HP Envy Move isn’t new either, but how cool is this All-in-One desktop that has a handle and a little pocket for the keyboard so you can easily carry it from one room to another?

HP makes a lot of great accessories, too. I love the ergonomic keyboard and vertical hand-position mouse!

HP’s HyperX Gaming accessories are pretty awesome too. There are all sorts of colors and customizations and 3D-printed character options to choose from.