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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

#371

Post by m348e912 »

jrflowers wrote: post #318
ragazzina wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want a solid laptop that can be used with the lid closed. I want to set it up and never open the lid again. I'll guess I'll keep dreaming.

Yeah they should make a laptop where you can choose what display you want to use, and which keyboard and mouse for that matter. It could be made cheaper by ditching the screen and keyboard, and heck I wouldn’t even mind if it were a bit bigger or heavier since it’ll just sit on or under my desk. That sort of laptop would be amazing.

They have computers that are built into keyboards now. Maybe that will do the trick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yl2twJswM

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

#372

Post by heavyset_go »

martinald wrote: post #238
heavyset_go wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The silicon is sitting idle in the case of most laptop NPUs. In my experience, embedded NPUs are very efficient, so there's theoretically real gains to be made if the cores were actually used.

Yes but you could use the space on die for GPU cores.

At least with the embedded platforms I'm familiar with, dedicated silicon to NPU is both faster and more power efficient than offloading to GPU cores.

If you're going to be doing ML at the edge, NPUs still seem like the most efficient use of die space to me.

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

#373

Post by vel0city »

nikanj wrote: post #48
FfejL wrote: post #10

> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't. I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.

Companies don’t really exist to make products for consumers, they live to create stock value for investors. And the stock market loves AI

The will of the stock market doesn't influence Dell, they're a privately held corporation. They're no longer listed on any public stock market.

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

#375

Post by zamadatix »

pxc wrote: post #342
zamadatix wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What seems to be delivered by NPUs at this point: filtering background noise from our microphone and blurring our camera using a watt or two less than before.

If it really is a watt or two less, that's a lot on a laptop.

If you do video calls for 7 hours a day and then ran out it means you could have maybe ~7.5 hours. Not nothing, but differences in things like screen backlight and other component efficiency still dominate battery interests over whether there is an NPU or not. If you don't spend your day on video calls it's more like a 0% increase (mic noise processing is much lower load).

Regardless if it does zilch or some minor good for you in the battery respect, the point was more NPUs don't deliver on the above reasons everyone was supposed to want AI for. Most likely, IMO, because they are far too weak to do so and making them powerful takes too much power+cost.

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

#376

Post by immibis »

Galanwe wrote: post #150

I have a "Copilot" button on my new ThinkPad. I have yet to understand what it does that necessitates a dedicated button. On Linux it does nothing, on Windows it tells me I need an Office 365 plan to use it. Like... What the hell... They literally placed a paywalled Windows only physical button on my laptop. What next, an always-on screen for ads next to the trackpad?

Good news: Office 365 has been renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

I'm serious. They dropped the Office branding and their office suite is now called Copilot.

This is good news because it means the Copilot button opens Copilot, which is exactly what you'd expect it to do.

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

#377

Post by amluto »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #359
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.

Also the Copilot button/key is useless. It cannot be remapped to anything in Ubuntu because it sends a sequence of multiple keycodes instead if a single keycode for down and then up. You cannot remap it to a useful modifier or anything! What a waste of keyboard real estate.

If you want a small adventure, you could see which HID device those keystrokes show up on, and they might be remappable courtesy of showing up on a HID device for that specific button. Failing that, they most likely come from either ACPI AML code or from the embedded controller (EC). If the former, it’s not that hard to patch the AML code, and maybe Copilot could do it for you (you use standard open source tooling to disassemble the AML blob, which the kernel will happily give you, and then you make a patched version and load it). If the latter, you could see if anyone has made progress toward finding a less silly way to configure the EC.

(The EC is a little microcontroller programmed by the OEM that does things like handling weird button presses.)

There are also reports of people having decent results using keyd to remap the synthetic keystrokes from the copilot button.

(The sheer number of times Microsoft has created totally different specs for how OEMs should implement different weird buttons is absurd.)

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

#379

Post by khr »

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?

Yes, on my Thinkpad I could remap it with Powertoys. It looks like the sibling comments have had issues though.

For me, the Copilot key outputs the chord "Win (Left) + Shift (Left) + F23". I remapped it to "Ctrl (Right)" and it's functioning as it should.

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

#380

Post by pseudosavant »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #361
hacker_homie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All the videos I've seen of AI workloads with an AMD Strix Halo with 128GB setup have used the GPU for the processing. It has a powerful iGPU and unified memory more like Apple's M chips.
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