Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by martinald » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:14 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #314

martinald wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes of course but it's basically a waste of silicon (which is very valuable) imo - you save a handful of watts to do very few tasks. I would be surprised if in the length of my MacBook the NPU has been utilised more than 1% of the time the system is being used. You still need a GPU regardless if you can do JPEG and h264 decode on the card - for games, animations, etc etc.

Do you use Apple's Photos app? Ever see those generated "memories," or search for photos by facial recognition? Where do you think that processing is being done? Your macbook's NPU is probably active every moment that your computer is on, and you just didn't know about it.

How often is the device either generating memories or I'm searching for photos? I don't use Apple Photos fwiw, but even if I did I doubt I'd be in that app for 1% of my total computer time, and of that time only a fraction of the time would be spent doing stuff on the ANE. I don't think searching for photos requires that btw, if they are already indexed it's just a vector search.

You can use asitop to see how often it's actually being used.

I'm not saying it's not ever used, I'm saying it's used so infrequently that any (tiny) efficiency gains do not trade off vs running it on the GPU.

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

#322

Post by SturgeonsLaw » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

xgkickt wrote: post #143

tecoholic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nailed it? Maybe close. They still have a keyboard button dedicated to Copoilot. That thing can’t be reconfigured easily.

Can PowerToys remap it?

Yep. I installed Claude as a PWA and used Powertoys to remap it to a command that launches it

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

#323

Post by benrazdev » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

I'll never forget walking through a tech store and seeing a HP printer that advertised itself as being "AI-powered". I don't know how you advertise a printer to make it exciting to customers but this is just ridiculous. I'm glad that tech companies are finally finding out people won't magically buy their product if they call it AI-powered.

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

#324

Post by SturgeonsLaw » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #174

neilsimp1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all. But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing. I cannot explain this.

If you develop software you can’t be as productive without an LLM as a competitor or coworker can be with one.

If you have the right soft skills, productivity is decoupled from career advancement

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

#325

Post by Gigachad » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #198

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 I had to steelman Dell, they probably made a bet a while ago that the software side would have something for the NPU, and if so they wanted to have a device to cash in on it. The turnaround time for new hardware was probably on the order of years (I could be wrong about this). It turned out to be an incorrect gamble but maybe it wasn’t a crazy one to make at the time. There is also a chicken and egg problem of sof…

They are still including the NPU though, they just realised that consumers aren't making laptop purchases based on having "AI" or being branded with Copilot.

The NPU will just become a mundane internal component that isn't marketed.

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

#326

Post by Gigachad » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

simulator5g wrote: post #303

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.

I'm not too familiar with the NPU, but this sounds a lot like GPU acceleration where a lot of the time you still end up having everything run on the CPU since it just works everywhere all the time rather than having to have both a CPU and an NPU version.

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

#327

Post by bfrog » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:40 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #229

bitwize wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?" "You multiply matrices of INT8s." "OH... MY... GOD" NPUs really just accelerate low-precision matmuls. A lot of them are based on systolic arrays, which are like a configurable pipeline through which data is "pumped" rather than a general purpose CPU or GPU with random memory access. So they're a bit like the "synergistic" processors in the Cell, in the respect that they accelerate some operatio…

Do compilers know how to take advantage of that, or do programs need code that specifically takes advantage of that?

It’s more like you need to program a dataflow rather than a program with instructions or vliw type processors. They still have operations but for example I don’t think ethos has any branch operations.

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

#328

Post by adastra22 » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

martinald wrote: post #321

adastra22 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Apple's Photos app? Ever see those generated "memories," or search for photos by facial recognition? Where do you think that processing is being done? Your macbook's NPU is probably active every moment that your computer is on, and you just didn't know about it.

How often is the device either generating memories or I'm searching for photos? I don't use Apple Photos fwiw, but even if I did I doubt I'd be in that app for 1% of my total computer time, and of that time only a fraction of the time would be spent doing stuff on the ANE. I don't think searching for photos requires that btw, if they are already indexed it's just a vector search. You can use asitop to see how often i…

Continuously in the background. There's basically a nonstop demand for ML things being queued up to run on this energy-efficient processor, and you see the results as they come in. That indexing operation is slow, and run continuously!

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

#329

Post by adastra22 » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:49 AM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #319

adastra22 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPUs aren't meant for LLMs. There are a lot more neural net tech out there than LLMs.

> NPUs aren't meant for LLMs. There are a lot more neural net tech out there than LLMs. OK, but where can I find demo applications of these that will blow my mind (and make me want to buy a PC with an NPU)?

Apple demonstrates this far better. I use their Photos app to manage my family pictures. I can search my images by visible text, by facial recognition, or by description (vector search). It automatically composes "memories" which are little thematic video slideshows. The FaceTime camera automatically keeps my head in frame, and does software panning and zooming as necessary. Automatic caption generation.

This is normal, standard, expected behavior, not blow your midn stuff. Everyone is used to having it. But where do you think the computation is happening? There's a reason that a few years back Apple pushed to deprecate older systems that didn't have the NPU.

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

#330

Post by shrubble » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 2:49 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.

The NPU is essentially the Sony Cell "SPE" coprocessor writ large.

The Cell SPE was extremely fast but had a weird memory architecture and a small amount of local memory, just like the NPU, which makes it more difficult for application programmers to work with.