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. :'(

Wait sorry back up a bit here. I can buy a laptop that has a daughter FPGA in it? Does it have GPIO??? Are we seriously building hardware worth buying again in 2024? Do you have a link?

It isn't as fun as you think - they are setup for specific use cases and quite small. Here's a link to the software page: https://ryzenai.docs.amd.com/en/latest/index.html

The teeny-tiny "NPU," which is actually an FPGA, is 10 TOPS.

Edit: I've been corrected, not an FPGA, just an IP block from Xilinx.

Yes, the one on the ryzen 7000 chips like the 7840u isn't massive, but that's the last gen model. The one they've just released with the HX370 chip is estimated at 50 TOPS, which is better than Qualcomm's ARM flagship that this post is about. It's a fivefold improvement in a single generation, it's pretty exciting.

A̵n̵d̵ ̵i̵t̵'̵s̵ ̵a̵n̵ ̵F̵P̵G̵A̵ It's not an FPGA

> And it's an FPGA.

nope it's not.

I've just ordered myself a jump to conclusions mat.