Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

Post by aleph_minus_one » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

generalizations wrote: post #263

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

NPUs were pushed by Microsoft, who saw the writing on the wall: AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience, edge computing is a huge advantage in that regard, and Apple's hardware can do it. NPUs are basically Microsoft trying to fudge their way to a llamacpp-on-Apple-Silicon experience. Obviously it failed, but they couldn't not try.

Post by simulator5g » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

Post by simulator5g » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

Post by lpribis » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

simulator5g wrote: post #305

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

If you do use video chat background blurring, the NPU is more efficient at it vs using your cpu or gpu. So the feature it supports is longer battery life, and less resource usage on your main chips, and better performance for the things that NPUs can do. E.g higher video quality on your blurred background.

Post by adastra22 » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

observationist wrote: post #218

zozbot234 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPUs are still useful for LLM pre-processing and other compute-bound tasks. They will waste memory bandwidth during LLM generation phase (even in the best-case scenario where they aren't physically bottlenecked on bandwidth to begin with, compared to the iGPU) since they generally have to read padded/dequantized data from main memory as they compute directly on that, as opposed to being able to unpack it in local reg…

The idea that tokenization is what they're for is absurd - you're talking a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a percent of efficiency gain in real world usage, if that, and only if someone bothers to implement it in software that actually gets used. NPUs are racing stripes, nothing more. No killer features or utility, they probably just had stock and a good deal they could market and tap into the AI wave with.