AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

I thought the purpose of these things was not to be fast, but to be able to run small models with very little power usage? I have a newer AMD laptop with an NPU, and my power usage doesn't change using the video effects that supposedly run on it, but goes up when using the nvidia studio effects.

It seems like the NPUs are for very optimized models that do small tasks, like eye contact, background blur, autocorrect models, transcription, and OCR. In particular, on Windows, I assumed they were running the full screen OCR (and maybe embeddings for search) for the rewind feature.

That's especially true because yours is a Xilinx FPGA. The one that they just attached to the latest gen mobile ryzens is 5x more capable too.

AMD are doing some fantastic work at the moment, they just don't seem to be shouting about it. This one is particularly interesting https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/DM6PR12MB3993D5ECA50B27682AEBE1...

edit: not an FPGA. TIL. :'(

It's not an FPGA. It's a VLIW DSP that Xilinx built to go into an FPGA-SoC to help run ML models.