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

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486 points dbreunig | 2 comments | 16 Oct 24 19:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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jsheard ◴[16 Oct 24 20:16 UTC] No.41863390[source]▶
These NPUs are tying up a substantial amount of silicon area so it would be a real shame if they end up not being used for much. I can't find a die analysis of the Snapdragon X which isolates the NPU specifically but AMDs equivalent with the same ~50 TOPS performance target can be seen here, and takes up about as much area as three high performance CPU cores:

https://www.techpowerup.com/325035/amd-strix-point-silicon-p...

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1. kllrnohj ◴[17 Oct 24 01:07 UTC] No.41865466[source]▶
Snapdragon X still has a full 12 cores (all same cores, it's homogeneous) and the Strix Point is also 12 cores but in a 4+8 configuration but with the "little" cores not sacrificing that much (nothing like the little cores in ARM's designs which might as well not even exist, they are a complete waste of silicon). Consumer software doesn't scale to that, so what are you going to do with more transistors allocated to the CPU?

It's not unlike why Apple puts so many video engines in their SoCs - they don't actually have much else to do with the transistor budget they can afford. Making single thread performance better isn't limited by transistor count anymore and software is bad at multithreading.

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2. wmf ◴[17 Oct 24 02:35 UTC] No.41865909[source]▶
GPU "infinity" cache would increase 3D performance and there's a rumor that AMD removed it to make room for the NPU. They're not out of ideas for features to put on the chip.