NPUs—useful addition to mobile tech, marketing malarkey, or utter bollocks?
"NPUs are specialized processors within system-on-chips (SoCs) designed to handle AI-specific tasks, like for example, background noise suppression, real-time video enhancement, and basic generative AI functions. "
—The Register
Sometimes known as an "AI accelerator". AI is the latest bit of marketing jive. A couple of years back it was either 3D everything or virtual reality, now everything is AI. An NPU is an additional processor that has hardware capable of improving certain calculations necessary in both developing and using AI models. ofen outed as necessary for the next generation of software, marketing folks at Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Microsoft have touted them as absolutely necessary to be up to date.
As far as I can tell the most important use case for most end-users is going to be for smart assistants, most especially voice interfaces like Google AI and whatever Microsoft is calling its assistant these days.
Many tech commentators are calling bullshit on the real-world value of NPUs, dismissing claims from Big Tech about the crucial necessity of them. Meanwhile, end-users are increasingly confused about the necessity of upgrading to the latest tech. For my part I'm ignoring the calls to upgrade as I believe that most of it is marketing hype at best, and possibly total and utter bollocks.
that said, I'm sure that as more software incorporates "improvements" that rely on AI, we'll get to be more dependent on them and more likely to need NPU hardware. Watch this space, but for now I'm with The Register, who offers "needless pricey upsell" as an alternative meaning of NPU.
Hazelnut says re neural processing unit: Clippy was bad enough.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
254