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Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

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Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#281

Post by Neywiny »

BeetleB wrote: post #271
cheema33 wrote: post #270

I did use whisper last night to get the captions out of a video file. The standard whisper tool from OpenAI uses CPU. It took more than 20 minutes to fully process a video file that was a little more than an hour long. During that time my 20-Core CPU was pegged at 100% utilization and the fan got very loud. I then downloaded an Intel version that used the NPU. CPUs stayed close to 0% and fans remained quiet. Total ta…

I suggest trying whisper-cpp if you haven't. It's probably the fastest CPU only version. But yeah, NPUs likely will be faster.

Depending on the part, it's likely the iGPU will be even faster. The new panther lake has iGPUs with either 80% or 250% the performance of the NPU when at the higher end. But on lower end models, it's lower but still within the same performance class

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#282

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kube-system wrote: post #275
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are free BIOSes.

IBM didn't ship any on their PC

So? You can replace the ROM chip (or flash it, if it's an EEPROM). The whole point of free software is that you don't have to limit yourself to what the manufacturer says you can do.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#283

Post by Mistletoe »

skrebbel wrote: post #279
throwaway293892 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Intel until recently. Pat Gelsinger (the prior CEO) had made one of the top goals for 2024 the marketing of the "AI PC". Every quarter he would have an all company meeting, and people would get to post questions on a site, and they would pick the top voted questions to answer. I posted mine: "We're well into the year, and I still don't know what an AI PC is and why anyone would want it instead of a…

So... what was the answer?

Probably a lot of jargon AI word salad that boiled down to “I’m leaving in Dec. 2024, you guys have fun.”

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#284

Post by throwaway293892 »

skrebbel wrote: post #279
throwaway293892 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Intel until recently. Pat Gelsinger (the prior CEO) had made one of the top goals for 2024 the marketing of the "AI PC". Every quarter he would have an all company meeting, and people would get to post questions on a site, and they would pick the top voted questions to answer. I posted mine: "We're well into the year, and I still don't know what an AI PC is and why anyone would want it instead of a…

So... what was the answer?

Pretty much the same as what you see in the comments here. For certain workloads, NPU is faster than CPU by quite a bit, and I think he gave some detailed examples at the low level (what types of computations are faster, etc).

But nothing that translated to real world end user experience (other than things like live transcription). I recall I specifically asked "Will Stable Diffusion be much faster than a CPU?" in my question.

He did say that the vendors and Microsoft were trying to come up with "killer applications". In other words, "We'll build it, and others will figure out great ways to use it." On the one hand, this makes sense - end user applications are far from Intel's expertise, and it makes sense to delegate to others. But I got the sense Microsoft + OEMs were not good at this either.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#285

Post by alfiedotwtf »

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.

> AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience

I hope not. Sure they’re helpful, but I’d rather they sit idle behind the scenes, and then only get used when a specific need arises rather than something like a Holodeck audio interface

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#286

Post by mrinterweb »

hamdingers wrote: post #261
mrinterweb wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple M series chips are solid for inference.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought everyone was still doing inference on the GPU for Apple silicon.

The Apple M series is SoC. The CPU, GPU, NPU, RAM are all part of the chip.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#287

Post by leptons »

tpurves wrote: post #11

Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.

I can't wait for all the data center fire-sales when the whole "AI" boom goes bust. Ebay is going to be flooded with tech.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#288

Post by kube-system »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #282
kube-system wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM didn't ship any on their PC

So? You can replace the ROM chip (or flash it, if it's an EEPROM). The whole point of free software is that you don't have to limit yourself to what the manufacturer says you can do.

I was responding to:

> Any computer running nonfree software can't be a personal one

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#289

Post by nomel »

wolvoleo wrote: post #126
giancarlostoro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, in my rage I typod, its really frustrating, even friends will text me and their text makes no sense, and 2 minutes later "STUPID VOICE TO TEXT" I have a few friends who drive trucks, so they need to be able to use their voice to communicate.

I have to say that OpenAI's Whisper model is excellent. If you could leverage that somehow I think it would really improve. I run it locally myself on an old PC with 3060 card. This way I can run whisper large which is still speedy on a GPU especially with faster-whisper. Added bonus is the language autodetection which is great because I speak 3 languages regularly. I think there's even better models now but Whisper…

I wonder what the wattage difference is between the iPhone STT and Whisper? How many seconds would the iPhone battery last?

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#290

Post by johnnyanmac »

wrl wrote: post #141
ericmcer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will want what LLMs can do they just don't want "AI". I think having it pervade products in a much more subtle way is the future though. For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed…

> Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is really difficult to do in traditional software but is something an LLM could do with low effort. I read this post yesterday and this specific example kept coming back to me because something about it just didn't sit right. And I finally figured it out: Glancing at the alert box (or th…

A rarer-ish chance to use this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

I'd put this in "save 5 seconds daily" to be generous. Remember that this is time saved over 5 years.

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