Mastodawn

cm0002 Aug 12, 2025

My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space

My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space

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corroded Aug 12, 2025

I have to wonder if NPUs are just going to eventually become a normal part of the instruction set.

When SIMD was first becoming a thing, it was advertised as accelerating “multimedia,” as that was the hot buzzword of the 1990s. Now, SIMD instructions are used everywhere, any place there is a benefit from processing an array of values in parallel.

I could see NPUs becoming the same. Developers start using NPU instructions, and the compiler can “NPU-ify” scalar code when it thinks it’s appropriate.

NPUs are advertised for “AI,” but they’re really just a specialized math coprocessor. I don’t really see this as a bad thing to have. Surely there are plenty of other uses.