LG debuts new Gram laptop series with onboard small language model

LG Electronics today Previewed A series of lightweight laptops with onboard small language models.

The company plans to launch the Gram series at next week’s CES consumer electronics conference.

The flagship device in the new laptop range is the 16-inch Gram Pro 16Z90TS. It can be ordered with chips from Intel’s Ultra V-series processor family, better known as Lunar Lake. This series of chips is targeted at energy-efficient notebook computers with onboard artificial intelligence software.

Each Lunar Lake processor contains three small dies: a central processing unit, a neural processing unit for running AI models, and a graphics processing unit. The latter module also contains circuitry optimized for machine learning. According to Intel, the NPU and GPU can jointly manage up to 115 TOPs, or trillions of operations per second, when running artificial intelligence applications.

Gram Pro 16Z90TS is the first LG laptop to support Microsoft’s Copilot+ standard. Launched in May, it provides laptops that meet certain hardware requirements with access to other AI features in Windows. There are also many network security enhancements.

The Lunar Lake chip in the Gram Pro 16Z90TS is backed by up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory, a type of RAM optimized for energy-efficient laptops. Customers can also configure the unit with 2 TB of flash memory.

The Gram Pro 17Z90TR is the second new laptop LG launched today, offering the same memory and flash memory options. But it replaces the 16-inch display that comes with the Gram Pro 16Z90TS with a larger 17-inch display. Additionally, LG offers a different set of processor options.

The Gram Pro 17Z90TR is not equipped with Lunar Lake, but a processor from the Intel Arrow Lake processor series. This chip series sacrifices some energy efficiency in exchange for higher performance. In addition, customers can order laptops from Nvidia equipped with a discrete GeForce RTX4050 graphics card, which is faster than the built-in GPU of Intel processors.

LG’s new laptop lineup includes the Gram 16T90TP, a 2-in-1 laptop that doubles as a tablet, and the entry-level Gram Book. The previous device offers similar specifications to the 17-inch 17Z90TR. The Gram Book combines a 15.6-inch display with an Intel Core i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and up to 1 TB of flash memory.

LG will provide laptops with an artificial intelligence feature called “time travel.” It is designed to help users find web pages, documents and multimedia files they have viewed in the past faster. LG says the feature doesn’t require an internet connection to work.

Under the hood, time travel is powered by an onboard mini-large model based on the company’s EXAONE series of algorithms.

The latest iteration of this algorithm series, EXAONE 3.5, is open source Completed by LG’s research department a few weeks ago. It includes four language models with up to 32 billion parameters. All four can handle prompts containing up to 32,000 tokens, each of which is a unit of data containing several letters or numbers.

LG said that the smallest EXAONE 3.5 model contains 2.4 billion parameters, and its performance is better than several algorithms of similar size. These include Llama 3.2 2B and Google LLC’s Gemma 2 2B. In addition, it exhibits higher output quality than Phi-3-small, a Microsoft language model with almost three times the number of parameters.

The company plans to offer time travel as well as a second artificial intelligence feature called Gram Chat Cloud. It uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o large language model to help users browse the web.

Photo: LG