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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

#291
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why this is a moat. Isn't it just a matter of translation from CUDA to some other instruction set? If AMD or someone else makes cheaper hardware that does the same thing, it doesn't seem like a stretch for them to release a PyTorch patch or whatever.

Sure you can probably translate rough code and get something that "works" but all the thousands of small optimizations that are baked in are not trivial to just translate.

I like the take that small optimizations, taken together, amount to a moat. I feel like this could be a profoundly understated paradigm.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--and whether anyone is using your interactions with your computer to train a model.

Luckily, while NPUs do nothing about data exfiltration, they're a poor solution for training models. Your data is still going to get sucked up to the mothership, but offloading training to your machine hopefully won't happen.

Yes, when I was writing my comment, I was imagining my user-interaction data getting sucked up to data centers.

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They don't think they're gods, they just think you're an idiot. This is not to say that you are, or even that they believe YOU individually are an idiot, it's just that users are idiots. There are also insurance, compliance, and other constraints that IT folks have that make them unwilling to turn off scanning for you.

> they just think you're an idiot.

To be fair, the average employee doesn’t have much more than idiot-level knowledge when it comes to security.

The majority of employees would rather turn off automatic OS updates simply because it’s a hassle to restart your computer because god forbid they you loose those 250 chrome tabs waiting for you to never get around to revisiting!

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shoehorning only works if there is buyer demand. As a company, if customers are willing to pay a premium for a NPU, or if they are unwilling to buy a product without one, it is not your place to say “hey we don’t really believe in the AI hype so we’re going to sell products people don’t want to prove a point”

Apple will have a completely AI capable product line in 18 months, with the major platforms basically done. Microsoft is built around the broken Intel tick/tick model of incremental improvement — they are stuck with OEM shitware that will take years to flush out of the channel. That means for AI, they are stuck with cloud based OpenAI, where NVIDIA has them by the balls and the hyperscalers are all fighting for GPU.…

Apple hasn’t shipped any ai features besides betas. I trust the people responsible for the useless abomination that is Siri to deliver a useful ai tool as much as I would trust Joe Biden to win a breakdancing competition.

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

#295
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will have a completely AI capable product line in 18 months, with the major platforms basically done. Microsoft is built around the broken Intel tick/tick model of incremental improvement — they are stuck with OEM shitware that will take years to flush out of the channel. That means for AI, they are stuck with cloud based OpenAI, where NVIDIA has them by the balls and the hyperscalers are all fighting for GPU.…

Apple hasn’t shipped any ai features besides betas. I trust the people responsible for the useless abomination that is Siri to deliver a useful ai tool as much as I would trust Joe Biden to win a breakdancing competition.

Well fortunately for all of us the people delivering client side ML today are totally different from the people who implemented a server side rule base assistant 10 years ago.

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

#296

I always thought that the main point of NPUs is energy efficiency (and being able to run ML models without taking over all computer resources, making it practical to integrate ML applications in the OS itself in ways that it does not disturb the user or the workflow) rather than being exceptionally faster. At least this has been my experience with running stable diffusion on macs. Similar to using other specialised h…

Not sure why this isn't discussed more here. I think exactly the same, the NPU occupies more silicon area because it has custom circuits specifically to reduce the number of cycles (and thus energy) needed to perform those calculations. Doesn't necessarily mean that a CPU wouldn't be able to bulldoze through it faster (with much more energy).

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

#297
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.

I have never seen, much less interacted with, a chromebook. I don't think they're as popular as you think, in a lot of not-usa

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

#299
OK, I am one of the developers in onnxruntime team. Perviously working on ROCm EP now has been transfered to QNN EP. The following is purely devrant and the opinions are mine.

So ROCm already sucks whereas QNN sucks even harder!

The conclusion here is NVIDIA knows how to make software that just works. AMD makes software that might work. Qualcomm, however, knows zero piece of shit of how to make a useful software.

The dev experience is just another level of disaster with Qualcomm. Their tools and APIs return absolutely zero useful infomation about what error you are getting, just an error code that you can grep from their include headers from SDK. To debug an error code, you need strace to get the internal error string on the device. Their profiler merely gives you a trace that cannot be associated back to original computing logic with very high stddev on the runtime. Their docs website is not indexed by the MF search engine, not to say LLMs, so if you have any question, good luck then!

So if you don't have a reason to use QNN, just don't use it (and any other NPU you name it).

Back to the benchmark script. There is a lot of flaws as I can see.

1. the session is not warmed up and the iteraion is too small. 2. the onnx graph is too small, I suspect the onnxruntime overhead cannot be ignored in this case. Try stack more gemm in the graph instead of increasing the iteration naively. 3. the "htp_performance_mode": "sustained_high_performance" might give a lower perf compare to "burst" mode.

A more reliable way to benchmark might just dump the context binary[1] and dump context inputs[2] and run this with qnn-net-run to get rid of the onnxruntime overhead.

[1]: https://github.com/cloudhan/misc-nn-test-driver/blob/main/qn... [2]: https://github.com/cloudhan/misc-nn-test-driver/blob/main/qn...

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

#300

OK, I am one of the developers in onnxruntime team. Perviously working on ROCm EP now has been transfered to QNN EP. The following is purely devrant and the opinions are mine. So ROCm already sucks whereas QNN sucks even harder! The conclusion here is NVIDIA knows how to make software that just works. AMD makes software that might work. Qualcomm, however, knows zero piece of shit of how to make a useful software. The…

NPU folks offen time say

> it's not enough time to get new silicon designs specifically for

Where blahblah stands for a model architecture that has caused a paradigm shift.

When you need a new silicon for a new model, you are already losing.

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