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