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The takeaway: If you’ve ever been to a CES in Las Vegas, you know how easy it is to get lost – not only amongst the convention halls, hotels, and meeting rooms, but also in the noise of all the announcements made at the event. Breaking through the nearly overwhelming tsunami of show news is no easy task, but with the benefit of a week to reflect on it all, it’s clear that the PC category was unquestionably a big and successful part of the news story from the event.

In some ways, it’s easy to see why. After all, it has become the show where the biggest PC chip suppliers (AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm) all announce their latest generation SoCs and all their largest customers (Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung among others) debut the latest systems housing these chips.

Even with the potential cloud of major DRAM shortages hanging over the industry’s head, this year’s CES was no exception. There was a large and impressive range of new machines, intriguing prototypes, and some amazing PC peripherals to highlight how even the mature PC industry hasn’t lost its ability to innovate.

Intel kicked things off with the official introduction of the Core Ultra Series 3 platform ("Panther Lake") at its keynote, hosted by the company’s Client Group lead Jim Johnson. While the core specs and basic capabilities of Intel’s latest mobile platform were announced last fall (*see Intel’s Latest Chips Push Innovation Forward *for more), the company hadn’t announced the final performance numbers for the new chip.

As it turns out, the results were a pleasantly positive surprise, particularly on the GPU side, where Intel’s latest Arc B390 graphics engine boasted a 77% improvement over the Core Ultra Series 2 ("Lunar Lake") introduced at CES 2025.

The CPU performance numbers were also solid, with a 60% increase over Lunar Lake. Battery life of up to 27 hours of Netflix streaming represented a modest improvement but still beats the widely praised numbers for Lunar Lake. The net result was an impressive jump forward that many PC OEMs I spoke with at the show suggested will put Intel back on solid footing after the tumultuous events of last year.

Qualcomm’s PC announcements brought several new additions to its Snapdragon X2 PC SoC line-up. Back at its fall Snapdragon Summit, the company debuted the top-of-the-line X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chips (see Qualcomm Focuses on Agentic AI with Latest Chips) and filled out the lower-cost portion of the portfolio with the X2 Plus platform at CES.

While leveraging the same Oryon 3 CPU core and newly designed 80 TOPS NPU of the high-end parts, the X2 Plus SoCs feature a lower number of CPU cores (either 6 or 10 vs. 18 in the X2 Elite), lower peak frequencies and smaller cache sizes. The end result is a less expensive part that will drive the creation of lower-cost Snapdragon X2-equipped PCs when they become available in the spring.

AMD’s wide-ranging CES keynote saw CEO Dr. Lisa Su tackle everything from Helios AI server racks, to robotics, space exploration, health care, and more. Additionally, the company had several PC-related announcements, including the official debut of its Ryzen AI 400 series chips for both laptops and desktops.

It also teased an intriguing new competitor to Nvidia’s DGX Spark that AMD is calling Ryzen AI Halo, which leverages the Ryzen AI Max SoC. The AI 400 series chips are based on the same Zen 5 CPU core as the AI 300 chips but include a faster 60 TOPS-capable NPU and a speedier connection to memory, which is critical for AI workloads.

Plus, unlike its other competitors, AMD has developed versions of its AI-focused SoCs that are specifically designed for desktops as well as notebooks. As with Intel, AMD, along with its partners, announced over 100 designs based on its latest AI PC processors.

From a PC product perspective, undoubtedly the biggest splash at CES was made by Lenovo, who rented out the enormous Sphere to host a visually impressive CES keynote, which they also called the Lenovo Tech World event.

As with many of the big tech-focused keynotes at CES, Lenovo’s covered a huge amount of ground – from AI rack servers to foldable Motorola smartphones and innovative PC designs – and featured walk-ons from a who’s who of the tech industry. On the PC side specifically, Lenovo showed off systems powered by the latest AI chip designs from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm.

The latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen14 Aura Edition, for example, features the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, while the consumer-focused Yoga Slim 7i Ultra Aura Edition offers CPU options from AMD and Qualcomm. In addition to mainstream designs, Lenovo showed some intriguing new prototypes, including a gaming-focused Legion Pro branded system that turned its rollable display technology on its side to create a system that could expand from 16" to 24" across.

Motorola Razr Fold

The Motorola group within Lenovo displayed the aforementioned Razr Fold, which morphs from a 6.6" inch front screen to an 8.1" tablet-like display. The company also showed a new high-end slab phone design called Motorola Signature that incorporates four 50 MP cameras and is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 smartphone SoC.

An intriguing wearable prototype codenamed "Project Maxwell" provided the ability to essentially record your life (both audibly and visually) with a pendant-shaped device.

Finally, Lenovo is hoping to bring the experience of using all of its devices together with what they’re calling an "ambient AI intelligence" experience named Qira. Full details of how Qira functions are still TBD, but essentially it provides an AI-powered way to easily share data across devices and leverage that information to provide a personalized, agentic-type of experience.

It’s an ambitious goal that could prove to be quite compelling, but there are huge challenges for integration with existing tools (such as Microsoft’s Copilot) along the way.

Image credit: PCMag

Dell also made big news at the show by reintroducing its beloved XPS brand and vigorously re-entering the consumer PC market, including an expansion of its popular Alienware line of gaming laptops down to lower price points.

The new XPS introduced at CES comes in a slick, thin, lightweight form factor and is available in both 14" and 16" screen sizes. All the new XPS’s feature tandem OLED screens and use Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs and its enhanced Arc graphics engine.

One of the most impressive debuts Dell made at CES was for its visually stunning 52" UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor. Not only does the monitor offer 6K resolution, it also integrates a powered Thunderbolt 4 hub and offers enough connectivity to let it function as the complete control center for a multi-PC setup. Having had the privilege of trying one for the last few weeks, I can confirm that it’s one of the most game-changing elements of a computing system I’ve ever used.

HP also made many interesting new announcements the show, including an AMD Ryzen-powered keyboard computer called the EliteBoard G1a that integrates the entire PC motherboard into a standard keyboard. Essentially a creative and original new take on the all-in-one PC, it allows businesses to match it with a range of different monitor options or switch out monitors whenever they choose.

On the commercial notebook side, HP also debuted several new variations of its Elitebook X G2 platform. In fact, HP offers the same basic design with the option of all three of the latest AI PC SoCs from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. Needless to say, this is bound to lead to some very interesting performance and battery life comparisons across the different chips. For consumers, the company also updated its OmniBook line with the latest Intel and Qualcomm processors.

Like Lenovo, Samsung focused on both smartphone and PC announcements at CES. Though officially introduced to other markets at the end of last year, Samsung finally showed their amazing Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone in the US market. The phone folds out to a nearly PC-like 10" display and arguably provides the first phone screen large enough to create a PC-like overlapping window UI.

It’s obviously thicker than the company’s current Z Fold 7, but impressively, it’s only about as deep as the Z Fold 6, yet has three screen elements instead of two. On the PC front, Samsung also used to CES to launch a major update to their Galaxy Book PC line.

Leveraging Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 across the board, the new Galaxy Book6 Ultra features optional support for Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 or 5070 GPUs, while the Book6 Pro and standard Book6 leverage Intel integrated graphics. The Ultra model uses a high-brightness 16" AMOLED display panel, while the Pro and standard are available in both 14" and 16" configurations.

All told, it was an impressive showing for the PC category at CES, from the key chip suppliers to systems, peripherals and more. The unfortunate timing of the DRAM shortage is likely to impact PC shipments this year but coming off a robust year of growth in 2025, let’s hope the momentum keeps moving in the right direction.

Bob O’Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech

Image credit: Florian Schindler