CES 2025 is in full swing and Dell has some major announcements. On this episode of Six Five On The Road, host Olivier Blanchard is joined by Kevin Terwilliger, VP and GM of PC Portfolio Management at Dell Technologies, for a conversation on Dell’s strategic innovations ahead of CES 2025.
They cover the following ⤵️
• A sneak peek into Dell’s AI PC strategy unveiling at CES 2025, including key trends and the opportunities it presents
• Insights into the IT customer and end-user dynamics driving the AI PC market and the strategic positioning of Dell’s new lineup
• The importance of silicon diversity in Dell’s innovation strategy, with a focus on partnerships with leading tech companies like Intel, Qualcomm, and Delta
• Dell’s commitment to sustainability and the circular economy across its new PC portfolio
• Strategies for engineering AI PCs that evolve with AI technologies to meet the future needs of both businesses and consumers
Get details on Dell’s announcements from CES 2025 and learn more at Dell Technologies.
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Transcript:
Olivier Blanchard: Hi, I am Olivier Blanchard, Research Director with The Futurum Group, and I’m here with Kevin Terwilliger, VP GM of PC Portfolio Management with Dell. Nice to have you in the chair-
Kevin Terwilliger: Thanks for having me, yeah.
Olivier Blanchard: So I have a few questions for you and let’s try to go through them at least on my end quickly, but you can take as long as you want to answer them.
Kevin Terwilliger: Sure.
Olivier Blanchard: So CES is coming up and you guys have some announcements, so what’s new and exciting in your world?
Kevin Terwilliger: Just a few announcements coming, lots of excitement obviously in our PC portfolio. Let me just lay out a couple of the things that we’ll be sharing at CES. The first is going to be around new branding of our portfolio and the importance of this is really, it’s a two and a half year journey of deduping our portfolio, really getting our products to be very purposeful. And then when we did that, we found that we could actually really zero in on a more simplified naming, it’s all rooted on Dell. Dell’s the brand that our customers really know, high recall rate, they trust that brand and so the rest of the words that we’ve made up to kind of put people into different categories, we’ve made that into really a simplified structure. So you’ll see us talk about three categories of Dell, Dell Pro, and then Pro Max, Max being for maximum performance. So that new branding is going to roll out at CES.
The other thing that we’ll talk about is expanding our silicon offering, and so as we’ve dug in more and more into AI PC, what we’ve learned is actually those AI workloads are very diverse and we want to meet customers where they are similar to our server business, whereas we understood more of those workloads, we added more silicon options in to meet those needs. We’ve done the same thing in our PC, so you’ll see us continuing with Intel. We launched Qualcomm earlier this year, now we’ll be bringing AMD broadly into our portfolio as well. So that’s two things. The third thing I’ll say is we have actually done a grounds up redesign of our whole PC portfolio and really anchored that on delivering optimized designs around these new architectures. And so man, there’s tons of innovation that we’ve packed into our portfolio.
We’ll be announcing at CES, our new premium tier within our Pro portfolio, and I’ll just rattle off a couple of the really cool things. So 20 hours of runtime, we’ve delivered the lightest PC with 2.43 pounds. We’ve enabled the quietest PC with sub one zone, so an office environment’s two to three zones so it’ll actually be silent operation. And then we wrap this around Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 2 Processor delivering fantastic improvements in multi-thread, 32% improvements in multi-thread, nearly 20% in single-thread, and 76% in graphics. So you think about all of that coming together in this new chassis just at the right time for the PC refresh. Really delivering to our customers the new simplified branding, new choices with silicon, and awesome new products all at that right time.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, that new nomenclature, that new grid that you’ve put together is actually really nice and I know it’s going to be tough going for people who are really used to the old nomenclature and the old model, but I feel like it’s much simpler and clearer now.
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah.
Olivier Blanchard: So yeah, past that adjustment period, it’s going to be good. So speaking of that, what do you think are some key trends and market dynamics that you’re seeing that you’re definitely more focused on in terms of IT customers, end users? And I guess as a follow-up, what are some of the opportunities there for Dell?
Kevin Terwilliger: I think one of the biggest trends that we’re seeing is all around these AI workloads, right? And so as we head into next year, we’re starting to see clarity around some of the opportunities that are going to be there of people who buy a PC with an NPU in it are going to get a set of capabilities that if they don’t, they don’t have access to those things. And then a step above that, a next-gen AI PC is we bring Copilot+ more broadly into the portfolio. Man, some of the things we see Microsoft announcing at Ignite of those capabilities that are coming, people are all of a sudden going to have a light bulb moment of, “That’s what local AI is.” These are capabilities that are brand new.
I’ll just give you one cool example, which is semantic search. Semantic search is something that Microsoft announced where they’re actually enabling you to search all your files on your PC based on natural language. So you don’t need to know the file name, you don’t need to know the version, you don’t need to know when you created it, you can search by the image on that slide and find the exact slide. I think that’ll save hours of time for knowledge workers.
Olivier Blanchard: It’ll save me hours of time daily, so I’m actually happy about this. So let’s switch gears just really quickly and talk about silicon diversity because obviously I’m very happy to hear about your AMD announcements, it’s something that we talked about in the past and I felt like it was a potential gap in your portfolio, and now the gap is being filled. So as a focus for Dell, how is Dell ensuring that its AI PCs remain at the forefront of silicon innovation with partners like Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD?
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah, that’s a great question. Even if you take a step back and you talk about Qualcomm first, right? So Qualcomm in June, we announced the largest portfolio with Qualcomm. And if you even go back two and a half years before that, we were working closely with Qualcomm understanding what the needs are that they really want to go and address and helping shape their roadmap as well, and Dell’s pretty unique in that. And the reason why we’re able to do that is because historically, over many, many generations, Dell has driven the largest mix of end generation silicon. So as we work with our partners to bring the latest and greatest features, generally Dell’s the one that ramps that in the industry, being number one in the client industry means we’ve driven that latest gen mix. And so because of that, we also help to really shape those roadmaps of what the use cases are that are best for each of the silicon partners.
As we’ve dug into those capabilities that are coming with AI PCs and next-gen AI PCs, what we’ve learned is actually AMD has a really awesome part coming as well. And what’s great with that is with their capabilities of Copilot+ they’re bringing coverage deeper into the price bands. And so for customers who are looking for more value-based local AI, AMD’s a great option for them. Now, Intel still has a fantastic part as well with their Core Ultra Series 2, great runtime rivaling where Qualcomm is, fantastic in single thread and snappiness. And so that’s an awesome part two for Copilot+, but that sits at a little bit more of a premium. And so we’ve built out a whole stack where we can offer those AI capabilities and really meet customers where they are.
Olivier Blanchard: Right, so you have X86, have Arm, and then you have basically just mix and match and pick your poison basically?
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah, a little more than that. I think actually Dell maybe is strategic in our approach of guiding our customers to the right silicon, the right CPU for their needs. We don’t want to take the approach of where we just put everything everywhere, that just confuses the industry even more. And my biggest worry is that it creates just analysis paralysis and more people will walk away from a PC refresh. What we really want to do is guide them to the right silicon for their needs. If they’re looking for absolute best runtime, Qualcomm is the right solution for that as an example.
Olivier Blanchard: Right. No, that makes perfect sense. That makes me happy.
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah.
Olivier Blanchard: So slightly different topic, even though we’ve seen a lot of cutouts of the PCs and how they’re built and the architecture, to me, the hardware is fascinating. I actually want to get you in the chair again to talk about some of the fan technology and how you’re managing to do all this with these thin, super thin form factors. And it’s just fascinating. But other respects to this, which I find also super interesting and valuable, and it’s a story I feel isn’t being told as much when it comes to Dell and it’s sustainability.
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah.
Olivier Blanchard: And so if you could just speak a little bit about how Dell is approaching PC design, especially with this refresh, with an eye towards enhancing the sustainability in those efforts.
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah. Well first of all, I would say Dell has led the industry in bringing more sustainable materials consistently. We’ve done it with enabling post-consumer carbon fiber, we’ve done it with enabling bioplastics, we did it this year being the first with 50% recycled cobalt coming into our batteries. We’re working on high percentages of recycled copper going into our power adapters. But probably the coolest thing is as we re-architected our whole portfolio, we started with this concept of modularity. And a great example of that, we maybe two examples. First is if you look inside our systems, we’ve actually broken down many of the components in more modular parts, which actually means that those parts are more serviceable. You’re not replacing a whole motherboard if you have a failure, you’re actually replacing a small little compute board, we’ve sub segmented that into more serviceable parts.
But we even did that all the way down to the ports. And so we got very focused on ports and the number of times that you’re plugging and replugging into a port, it’s one of the things that does fail over the whole life of a PC. And so we took a step back and really applied all of our innovation engine into sustainability and modularity of ports. So we’re introducing the world’s first modular USB-C port. It’s pretty cool actually now, if you have a USB-C port failure, which it’s actually 3X more durable because of the way we’re attaching it to the board.
Olivier Blanchard: Right.
Kevin Terwilliger: But if it does fail now it’s just a port replacement, you’re not changing a whole motherboard it’s two screws, you take a port out and you put a new one in. Massively more sustainable, much better for the environment. So these are steps we continue to take and all of this comes from this legacy of Luna, and we talked about that over many years, and we’ve been consistently taking pieces from that Luna design, that halo kind of innovation vehicle and embedding that deeply into our portfolio. So that modular type C port is actually across our whole Pro portfolio.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So that’s going to help me too, because I’m one of those people who likes to pull a laptop up by the USB port.
Kevin Terwilliger: Oh man.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, so that’s good. I think you designed that specifically for me again. To wrap up last question, how is Dell thinking about engineering AI PCs to keep up with the pace of AI innovation more broadly?
Kevin Terwilliger: Yeah, yeah. So we’re very focused on helping our customers future-proof and when we say that it’s not just like, “Go buy an NPU because there’s cool things coming.” It actually has to do with the whole way that we’re architecting the system. And here at this show, we actually have some of our thermal engineers downstairs talking about how we’re changing the design and how through our patented thermal designs, we’ve made it so that we don’t have any bounding kind of capacity of as that NPU gets used more potentially having to go and constrain other things.
So we’ve gone and totally changed those thermal designs so that as those workloads continue to come in AI, we know that the PC we’re selling today is something we can put in our customer’s hands and trust that it will withstand the years to come of how those workloads are changed. That’s a pretty hard thing to do, engineering and architecting the system for workloads that we’re still actually thinking up that are going to come in three or four years. And so the thermal design and the number of patents and innovation around that we believe is a massive differentiator for Dell as how we’re thinking about enabling our customers around AI.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. Perfect. All right, well that’s all the time we have. Thanks a lot for joining us and look for more of our content soon. This is Olivier Blanchard sending off. Take care, bye.
Author Information
Olivier Blanchard has extensive experience managing product innovation, technology adoption, digital integration, and change management for industry leaders in the B2B, B2C, B2G sectors, and the IT channel. His passion is helping decision-makers and their organizations understand the many risks and opportunities of technology-driven disruption, and leverage innovation to build stronger, better, more competitive companies.
