hwertz
Posts: 517 +273
Blah. I mean, I've tried to use one of these NPUs before and they're damn near useless. My 11th gen Intel system has a 1st-gen NPU in it, and I was like "OK, I want to run some Tensorflow jobs, I'll use the NPU!" Oh no! It only supports 1-dimensional data, with something like a 64KB size limit. Basically it could be used for processing audio and that's it! (Windows apparently uses it for filtering out background noise on the mic.) I'm not running Windows so... Linux does have a driver for the NPU, and Tensorflow or something did support it; but I was not processing audio so I found it to be completely useless and it's sat in there unused to this day.
I think it's a big mistake to compromise the performance of the actual CPU and GPU (which, after all, is what people buy an APU for) in order to cram some NPU into it. Maybe they should make one model with NPU, and one with more cache? I for one would rather have better application performance. They're kind of making the same mistake Intel did (for a while) when they began loading chips down with AVX512 units, only to find if you actually went to use them (like video encoding on all cores) that the heat production was so high it was faster on these systems to not use all the AVX512 cores.
I think it's a big mistake to compromise the performance of the actual CPU and GPU (which, after all, is what people buy an APU for) in order to cram some NPU into it. Maybe they should make one model with NPU, and one with more cache? I for one would rather have better application performance. They're kind of making the same mistake Intel did (for a while) when they began loading chips down with AVX512 units, only to find if you actually went to use them (like video encoding on all cores) that the heat production was so high it was faster on these systems to not use all the AVX512 cores.