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AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

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Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Goths in 2000's were at best second wave nostalgia cycle of Goths from the 1980s. That people recalling Goths in that period should beware of thinking that was a source and not an echo. In 2006 Noel Fielding's Richmond Felicity Avenal was a basement dwelling leftover from many years past.

True Goth died our way before any of that. They totally sold out when the sacked Rome, the gold went to their heads and everything since then has been nostalgia.

That was just the faux life Westside Visigoths .. what'd you expect?

#Ostrogoth #TwueGoth

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#212
post #209
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has indeed a problem, however only in countries whose people can afford Apple level prices, and not everyone is a G7 citizen.

Microsoft is slowly being squeezed from both sides of the market. Chromebooks have silently become wildly popular on the low end. The only advantage I see windows have is corporate and gaming. But valve is slowly chopping away at the gaming advantage as well.

Chromebooks are no where to be seen outside US school market.

Coffe shops, trains and airports in Europe? Nope, rare animal on tables.

European schools? Most countries parents buy their kids a computer, and most often it is a desktop used by the whole family, or a laptop of some kind running Windows, unless we are talking about the countries where buying Apple isn't an issue on the monthly expenses.

Popular? In Germany, the few times they get displayed on shopping mall stores, they get rountinely discounted, or bundled with something else, until finally they get rid of them.

Valve is heavily dependent on game studios producing Windows games.

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#213
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft needs to throw something in the gap to slow down MacBook attrition. The M processors changed the game. My teams support 250k users. I went from 50 MacBooks in 2020 to over 10,000 today. I added zero staff - we manage them like iPhones.

Rightly so. The M processor really did completely eliminate all sense of “lag” for basic computing (web browsing, restarting your computer, etc). Everything happens nearly instantly, even on the first generation M1 processor. The experience of “waiting for something to load” went away. Not to mention these machines easily last 5-10 years.

It's fine. For basic computing, my M3 doesn't feel much faster than my Linux desktop that's like 8 years old. I think the standard for laptops was just really, really low.

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#214
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early 2000's ?? Bela Lugosi Died in 1979, and Peter Murphy was onto his next band by 1984. By 2000 Goth was fully a distant dot in the rear view mirror for the OG's In 2002, Murphy released *Dust* with Turkish-Canadian composer and producer Mercan Dede, which utilizes traditional Turkish instrumentation and songwriting, abandoning Murphy's previous pop and rock incarnations, and juxtaposing elements from progressive…

There was a submission here a few months ago about the various incarnations of goth starting from the late Roman empire. https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-goths

Was there? This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41232761 ?

Nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZvSqgn_Zf4

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#215
post #63

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If they aren't being used it would be better to dedicate the space to more SRAM.

The point is parts of the CPU have to be off or throttled down when other components are under load to maintain TDP, adding cache that would almost certainly be being used defeats the point of that.

Cache doesn't use nearly as much power as active computation; that was my point.

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#216

I think the results show that just in general the compute is not used well. That the CPU took 8.4ms and GPU took 3.2ms shows a very small gap. I'd expect more like 10x - 20x difference here. I'd assume that the onnxruntime might be the issue. I think some hardware vendors just release the compute units without shipping proper support yet. Let's see how fast that will change. Also, people often mistake the reason for…

> Also, people often mistake the reason for an NPU is "speed". That's not correct. The whole point of the NPU is rather to focus on low power consumption. I have a sneaking suspicion that the real real reason for an NPU is marketing. "Oh look, NVDA is worth $3.3T - let's make sure we stick some AI stuff in our products too."

yeah I'm not sure being 1% utilised helps power consumption

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messes with timing, among other things. A lot of those structures are relatively fixed blocks that are designed for specific sizes. Signals take more time to propagate longer distances, and longer conductors have worse properties. Dense and hot is faster and more broadly useful.

Interesting, so does that mean we're basically out of runway without aggressive cooling?

No.

Every successive semiconductor node uses less power than the previous per transistor at the same clock speed. Its just that we then immediately use this headroom to pack more transistors closer and run them faster, so every chip keeps running into power limits, even if they continually do more with said power.

Re: AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: turn off malware scanning in your git repos[0]. There is also the new Dev Drive feature in Windows 11 that makes it even easier for developers (and IT admins) to set this kind of thing up via policies[1]. In companies where I worked where the IT team rolled out "security" software to the Mac-based developers, their computers were not noticeably faster than Windows PCs at all, especially given the majority of…

Unfortunately, the IT department people think they are literal GODs for knowing how to configure Domain Policies and lock down everything. They even refuse to help or even answer requests for help when there are false positives on our own software builds that we cannot unmark as false positives. These people are proactively antagonistic to productivity. Management could not careless…

Nobody wants to be resonsible for giving allowing exceptions in security-matters. Its far easier to ignore the problems at hand, then to risk being wrong just once.
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