Announced at an event at HP's headquarters in Palo Alto last month, the EliteBook X G1a is the most powerful commercial AI PC to date, packing a 55 TOPS NPU. That NPU is part of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375, and if you want it, you have to buy HP. Right now, the company has an exclusive on the chip, and the rest of the market maxes out at 50 TOPS.

I've mostly been pretty negative about AI PCs, and why shouldn't I be? Most of the efforts we've seen this far have been pretty lame. The first-gen products with 10-ish TOPS NPUs had Windows Studio Effects as their hero feature, which wasn't too impressive when any meeting software can do all of that stuff anyway. Copilot+ sounds great, but since Recall got pushed back, the leftover features haven't been exciting.

HP has me convinced, because while I'm still not a believer in Copilot+, Microsoft's first-party stuff isn't all there is. This company is going all-in on AI, and it's a unique value proposition compared to other OEMs, which are relying on other software vendors to make AI meaningful.

HP sent me a pre-production unit of the EliteBook X for a preview. It had no input on the contents of this article, other than that benchmarking of this unit is not allowed. A full review will come later when production units are available.

The hardware

It's still just a great laptop

HP overhauled its branding this year, a bit less so on the business side. However, there won't be an EliteBook 1000 series anymore. That's replaced with EliteBook X. It's deeper than that though, because the EliteBook X G1a isn't quite the successor to the EliteBook 1040 G11, a product that I recently called the only Meteor Lake laptop still worth buying.

Indeed, the EliteBook X is powered by AMD Ryzen AI processors, it's heavier, it has a different keyboard, it's made of metal, there are no 5G options, and there are fewer display options. I asked a lot of questions about this, trying to get to the bottom about why HP would change so much of such a great product.

The answer, like I just said, is that this actually isn't a direct successor to the EliteBook 1040 G11. AMD Ryzen AI 300 isn't just about the NPU; it's the most powerful mobile CPU on the market right now. This product is made for people that want that kind of power, so with that in mind, some of the changes start to make sense. If that's not for you, there will be something like an EliteBook X G1i (the 'i' is for Intel) coming later, maybe a Flip model like HP did with OmniBook.

That additional power means it weighs more, coming in at 3.3 pounds, about two-thirds of a pound heavier than the EliteBook 1040 G11. And it's made of aluminum, a more premium yet heavier material than magnesium.

The keyboard is different, one of the first things I noticed at the HP Imagine event. Seriously, someone at Lenovo once called me "the keyboard whisperer" because I'll notice differences that they thought wouldn't make a difference. So yes, I noticed the new 1.5mm keys instantly.

They replace 1.3mm keys, but it doesn't feel very different. This is still one of the best keyboards on the market, something that's underrated among laptop OEMs, considering that it's our primary input mechanism. As usual, the keys wobble less than anything else, and they require a comfortable amount of force to press them.

HP is also using its new two-tone design, which I love to see. The light silver chassis is complemented by the dark gray keyboard, making for an overall pleasant aesthetic.

All-in-all, this is just a great laptop. It's got a best-in-class keyboard, a wonderful webcam (which I'll talk more about in a bit, but HP is so far ahead of its competition on webcams), and a powerful CPU.

AI features

HP is ahead of the competition

The HP EliteBook X G1a is the only business laptop to have a 55 TOPS NPU, and it's going to stay that way for a while, since the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 that's under the hood is exclusive to HP right now. But the non-PRO version of that chip first launched in the HP OmniBook Ultra, and let me tell you, when the company launched this product, it barely talked about it.

At an event in New York, the firm talked up AI capabilities and a 55 TOPS NPU, with no mention of which chip was being used. It wasn't until a Q&A later when someone asked what was under the hood, and an HP exec simply said, "AMD". The problem was that this processor wasn't announced yet; at the time, AMD's public messaging was that Ryzen AI 300 gets up to 50 TOPS.

The point is, HP's messaging is all about AI, which is good, because Microsoft seems to be pretty bad at it. When it comes to reviewing Copilot+ PCs, I've been pretty consistent that you should get them because they're great PCs, but not because you want Microsoft's suite of on-device AI features. Cocreator, Windows Studio Effects, and Live Captions aren't particularly useful, and Recall has yet to see the light of day (it's coming soon, along with a second wave of Copilot+ features).

That's all fine and good, because Copilot+ isn't ready for x86 yet anyway. But Microsoft's features aren't all there is for AI, and as it turns out, some of this stuff is actually useful.

Introducing AI Companion, an app that HP is offering on its next-gen AI PCs. It has three tabs: Discover, Analyze, and Perform. Perform manages performance settings, as you'd expect, and you can use natural language to say what you want.

But what I'm really digging is the Analyze feature. I work with a lot of press kits, and some of them are pretty large. Often, when I'm writing about a range of products, I'm bouncing between a bunch of spec sheets, and digging through various folders in a multi-gigabyte package.

With AI Companion, I now take all of the PDFs in those press kits and drop them in the app. For this example, I used the HP Imagine press kit, which had a total of 38 (!) PDFs. So now, when writing an article like this and I'm asking myself, "Hey, what was the weight of the EliteBook X again?" I no longer have to pull up the spec sheet. I just ask the AI Companion because it knows everything about the products I'm writing about. It's fantastic.

I'm not pretending that these features are unique or that no other AI analyzes documents, but AI Companion comes with the device, it's free, and none of your data leaves the device. That means that if I'm working with embargoed press kits, I don't have to worry about it getting uploaded and breaking an NDA.

That's not all. Poly Camera Pro takes HP's already-excellent webcam to another level. Frankly, it puts Windows Studio Effects to shame. Not only can it blur your background or even remove it, using the NPU to save power, it can apply a whole range of effects to your webcam. And these are controls like brightness, saturation, and contrast, not filters that make you look animated like we see from Copilot+. You can use overlays too, in case you want to add your name and information on top of your video.

What HP is doing is good, sensible use of an NPU. For a lot of other companies out there, I feel like they're just saying, "We have to do something with AI!" It feels to me like HP actually took a step back and thought about what would be useful in improving the lives and productivity of its users. And what's nuts is that no one else is doing anything like this. HP just seems to be so ahead of the curve on a lot of things, and it's just making some of the best laptops right now.

Pricing for the HP EliteBook X isn't available yet, and it'll be on sale in December.