https://www.techpowerup.com/325035/amd-strix-point-silicon-p...
https://www.techpowerup.com/325035/amd-strix-point-silicon-p...
This has been my thinking. Today you have to go out of your way to buy a system with an NPU, so I don't have any. But tomorrow, will they just be included by default? That seems like a waste for those of us who aren't going to be running models. I wonder what other uses they could be put to?
That's already the way things are going due to Microsoft decreeing that Copilot+ is the future of Windows, so AMD and Intel are both putting NPUs which meet the Copilot+ performance standard into every consumer part they make going forwards to secure OEM sales.
Actually, could they be used to make better AI in games? That'd be neat. A shooter character with some kind of organic tactics, or a Civilisation/Stellaris AI that doesn't suck.
They're useful for more things than just LLM's.
Presumably you have a GPU? If so there is nothing an NPU can do that a discrete GPU can’t (and it would be much slower than a recent GPU).
The real benefits are power efficiency and cost since they are built into the SoC which are not necessarily that useful on a desktop PC.
As to why, I think it's along the lines of this: the CPU does 100 things, one of those is AI acceleration. Let's take the AI acceleration and give it its own space instead so we can keep the power down a bit, add some specialization, and leave the CPU to do other stuff.
Again, I'm coming at this from a high-level as if explaining it to my ageing parents.
So, I'm not sure that you're wasting much with the NPU. But I'm not an expert.