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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

#361

Post by SomeHacker44 »

hacker_homie wrote: post #209
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.

Yeah, that's because the original npus were a rush job, the amd AI Max is the only one that's worth anything in my opinion.

I have a Strix Halo 395 128GB laptop running Ubuntu from HP. I have not been able to do anything with the NPU. I was hoping it could be used for OpenCL, but does not seem so.

What examples do you have of making the NPU in this processor useful please?

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

#363

Post by gaowanlu »

gaowanlu wrote: post #362

Everyone just wants a laptop with the latest NVIDIA graphics card, but also good cooling and a slim design. That's all. People don't care what AI features are built in; that's for Windows and applications.

Consumers will prioritize products with the latest hardware, good performance, and low price.

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

#364

Post by gaowanlu »

gaowanlu wrote: post #363
gaowanlu wrote: post #362

Everyone just wants a laptop with the latest NVIDIA graphics card, but also good cooling and a slim design. That's all. People don't care what AI features are built in; that's for Windows and applications.

Consumers will prioritize products with the latest hardware, good performance, and low price.

In today's economic environment, cost-effectiveness is a primary consideration for consumers.

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

#365

Post by imtringued »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #333
adastra22 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 norm…

I've yet to see any convincing benchmarks showing that NPUs are more efficient than normal GPUs (that don't ignore the possibility of downclocking the GPU to make it run slower but more efficient)

https://fastflowlm.com/benchmarks/

https://fastflowlm.com/assets/bench/gemma3-4b.png

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

#366

Post by imtringued »

cookiengineer wrote: post #356
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…

My question is: Isn't this exactly what SIMD has done before? Well, or SSE2 instructions? To me, an NPU and how it's described just looks like a pretty shitty and useless FPGA that any alternative FPGA from Xilinx could easily replace.

Yes but your CPUs have energy inefficient things like caches and out of order execution that do not help with fixed workloads like matrix multiplication. AMD gives you 32 AI Engines in the space of 3 regular Ryzen cores with full cache, where each AI Engine is more powerful than a Ryzen core for matrix multiplication.

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

#367

Post by imtringued »

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.

I think the reason why NPUs failed is that Microsoft's preferred standard ONNX and the runtime they developed is a dud. Exporting models to work on ONNX is a pain in the ass.

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

#369

Post by altern8 »

yalogin wrote: post #27

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time.…

> did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements

To be fair, they did announce flashy AI features. They just didn't deliver them after people bought the products.

I've been reading about possible class action lawsuits and even the government intervening for false advertisement.

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

#370

Post by TitaRusell »

throwaway293892 wrote: post #273
kenjackson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of what these local NPUs can really do. I've had friends ask me about this (as the resident computer expert) and I really have no idea. Everything I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text, etc...) are all things that I never felt like my non-NPU machine struggled with. Is there a single remotely killer application for local client NPUs?

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…

The only people who are actually paying good money for a PC nowadays are gamers- and they sure as hell aren't paying 3k so that they can use copilot.
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