https://www.techpowerup.com/325035/amd-strix-point-silicon-p...
https://www.techpowerup.com/325035/amd-strix-point-silicon-p...
The more they say the future will be better the more that it looks like the status quo.
I'd be willing to bet that the amount of money they are missing out on is miniscule and is by far offset by people's money who care about other stuff. Like you know, performance and battery life, just to stick to your examples.
Apple originally added their NPUs before the current LLM wave to support things like indexing your photo library so that objects and people are searchable. These features are still very popular. I don't think these NPUs are fast enough for GenAI anyway.
The camera is real good though.
“Recent” seems to mean everything; I’ve got 6k+ photos, I think since the last fresh install, which is many devices ago.
Sounds like the view you’re looking for and will stick as the default once you find it, but you do have to bat away some BS at first.
The realities of mass manufacturing and supply chains and whatnot mean it's cheaper to get a laptop with a webcam I don't use, a fingerprint reader I don't use, and an SD card reader I don't use. It's cheaper to get a CPU with integrated graphics I don't use, a trusted execution environment I don't use, remote management features I don't use. It's cheaper to get a discrete GPU with RGB LEDs I don't use, directx support I don't use, four outputs when I only need one. It's cheaper to get a motherboard with integrated wifi than one without.
Fwiw there should be no power downside to having an unused unit. It’ll just not be powered.
In practice, everyone is paying a premium for NPUs that only a minority desires, and only a fraction of that minority essentially does "something" with it.
This thread really helps to show that the use-cases are few, non-essential, and that the general application landscape hasn't adopted NPUs and has very little incentive to do so (because of the alien programming model, because of hardware compat across vendors, because of the ecosystem being a moving target with little stability in sight, and because of the high-effort/low-reward in general).
I do want to be wrong, of course. Tech generally is exciting because it offers new tools to crack old problems, opening new venues and opportunities in the process. Here it looks like we have a solution in search for a problem that was set by marketing departments.