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AI PCs flood the market. Their makers hope someone wants them; Despite 49% surge in shipments, buyers seem unconvinced. (www.theregister.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Basically yes. They come with an NPU (Neural processing unit) which is hardware acceleration for matrix multiplications. It cannot do graphics. Slap whatever NPU into the chip, boom: AI laptop!

[–] JohnDClay 2 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Matrix multiplication is also largely what graphics cards do, I wonder how the npus are different.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Modern graphics cards pack a lot of functionality. Shading units, Ray tracing, video encoding/deciding. NPU is just the part needed to accelerat Neural nets.

[–] JohnDClay 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But you can accelerate nural nets better with a GPU, right? They've got a lot more parallel matrix multiplication compute than any npu you can slap on a CPU.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

It all depends on the GPU. If it's something integrated in the CPU it will probably not so better, if it's a 2000$ dedicated GPU with 48GB of VRAM is will be very powerful for Neural Net computing. NPUs are most often implemented as small, low-power, embedded solutions. Their goal is not to compete with data centers or workstations, it's to enable some basic "AI" features on portable devices. E.g: "smart" camera with object recognition to give you alerts.