Nothing to do with NPUs, as far as I know, it's down to the dedicated video stream acceleration that ARM chips have carried for a while.

In practical terms, Windows Hello unlocks noticeably faster, just like a phone with facial recognition does. It also disproportionately handles video playback more efficiently, given the relative overall performance. Nothing new, either, it's all stuff Apple got out of their own ARM transition, but way underrated in how much of a moment-to-moment difference it makes, particularly for stuff like the Surface Pro and other hybrids, where you want to handle it on battery and use it more like a tablet sometimes.

I've been extremely annoyed with all partisanship on this issue from the go. The absolutely insane range of promises, hyperbole and circlejerking among the AI techbros is absolutely insufferable. Meanwhile, the other side has been entirely content with getting a chance to repeat the dogpile they (deservedly) gave cryptobros and entirely unwilling to acknowledge any sort of nuance, often to the point of deliberate misinformation.

The only reason I'm not angrier at this is that, honestly, this whole thing is way less momentous than either side has claimed and I have bigger things to get mad about.

Hah. Been there, done that. Partially thanks to the US, actually.

All countries have their history. It's part of why I don't feel I'm obligated to watch, honestly.

Screw that. I am forced to deal with US politics and culture in enough areas of my life to be shamed for refusing to care about their self-harming tendencies. I don't have a need to care about what the US do to themselves in the same way I don't have a need to care about what Argentina or Hungary or Russia do to themselves. At least Russians don't have a real choice.

Admittedly, I did have the compulsion to write that down here at all, as opposed to those other examples. In my defense, that's because a) I literally wrote that as I clicked the "block" button in this community, and b) it's insanely hard to not pay attention to the US. It requires active effort. This community isn't even called "US politics", it's just called "Politics". The US dominating my media is the default stance of the world, I have to take aggressive action to make that not be the case.

Yeah, my problem is that this was made to coincide with the Snapdragon Windows PCs, which are really good at a bunch of stuff and specifically not good at NPU performance, so the result of the "AI" branding ends up being really disappointing.

We could talk about all the other growing pains and the ways those devices were covered, but the obsessive focus on "AI" certainly didn't help, as demonstrated by the bizarre reporting linked in the OP.

That is a weird proposal.

It's definitely weird that everyone is panicking about data center processing costs but not about the exact same hardware powering high end gaming devices that have skyrocketed from 100W to 450W in a few years, but ultimately if you want to run a model locally you can run a model locally. I'm not sure how you'd regulate that, it's just software.

Hell, I don't even think distributing the load is a terrible idea, it's just that the models you can run locally in 40 TOPS kinda suck compared to the order of magnitude more processing you get on modern GPUs.

That's fair, I hadn't considered the scenario of a bunch of old GOG-supported games needing updates.

I mean, in my defense that's because a lot of the older catalogue is just running under DosBox, but there's definitely more finicky stuff in there as well.

The idea is having tensor acceleration built into SoCs for portable devices so they can run models locally on laptops, tablets and phones.

Because, you know, server-side ML model calculations are expensive, so offloading compute to the client makes them cheaper.

But this gen can't really run anything useful locally so far, as far as I can tell. Most of the demos during the ramp-up to these were thoroughly underwhelming and nowhere near what you get from server-side services.

Of course they could have just called the "NPU" a new GPU feature and make it work closer to how this is run on dedicated GPUs, but I suppose somebody thought that branding this as a separate device was more marketable.

Well, no shit.

I've been phasing out US channels from my social media and I think it's time to block Lemmy politics and other US-focused politics discussion from here as well. I don't have much compassion for what Americans will endure the next however many years, but man, it does suck for everybody else.

Yeah, I've been confused about this. They are basically branding the games they don't own but are supporting out of pocket, if I understand correctly.

So no, they don't own Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3, but they did the work to make them run on modern PCs, so they are now flagging them as part of their preservation program. I don't think it goes beyond that, but it's useful to have a flag for them, I suppose. It may make it easier to sell the idea to publishers or whatever.

The stupid difference is supposed to be that they have some tensor math accelerators like the ones that have been on GPUs for three generations now. Except they're small and slow and can barely run anything locally, so if you care about "AI" you're probably using a dedicated GPU instead of a "NPU".

And because local AI features have been largely useless, so far there is no software that will, say, take advantage of NPU processing for stuff like image upscaling while using the GPU tensor calculations for in-game raytracing or whatever. You're not even offloading any workload to the NPU when you're using your GPU, regardless of what you're using it for.

For Apple stuff where it's all integrated it's probably closer to what you describe, just using the integrated GPU acceleration. I think there are some specific optimizations for the kind of tensor math used in AI as opposed to graphics, but it's mostly the same thing.

This is such a hilarious bit of branding nonsense. There is no such thing as "AI PCs".

I mean, I technically own one, in that the branding says I do and it has a Copilot button, but... well, that's definitely not why I purchased it and I don't think I've used an "AI feature" on it. I'm not even opinionated against them, I have run local LLMs in my other computers, it's just not a good application for the device I own that is specifically branded for "AI".

The stupidity of it is that my "AI device" is an ARM device, and I absolutely love the things ARM Windows does that are actually useful. I pulled up my old x64 device that I used before I got this and man, the speed of Windows Hello, how much better it handles video streams, the efficiency... I'd never go back for a portable device at this point.

But the marketing says it's "AI", so once people start telling each other that "AI PCs" are bad and new AMD and Intel "AI" CPUs are released it's anybody's guess how the actually useful newer Windows ARM devices will fare.

I'm still hoping that the somewhat irrational anger towards "AI" stuff subsides so we can start talking about real features now, because man, this has been a frustrating generation to parse for portable Windows devices, and we still have Android, iOS and Mac devices coming down the pipe with similar branding nonsense.

Yeah, no, we're on the same page. Whether you pin it on the OP or Piker. There are a bunch of presumably leftist pundits that have been asking to see the left's management all through this process (and I mean since 2016) and will continue to act offended that anybody would suggest there is a responsibility in not being persuaded when the alternative is a fascist anarchocapitalist cabal.

As last time, the response to any mention of this will be "it's their fault for not convincing me", which has never been a legitimate argument but will be outright insulting if (when) things start to go poorly.

A better case is that the entire country shifted right, especially fed by a mass of new protofascist youth, but you don't get extra credit for only being part of the problem and not the whole problem.

In any case, like I said earlier, I have no obligation to split hairs. The US has failed as a country and as a people. They can apportion blame however they see fit. For the rest of us it is now a matter of how to build an international community of democracies in the upcoming climate. We all have to write off the US and find a new way forward without them.

There will be a lot of this. Same thing happened with Hillary. I'm not American, I don't need to discriminate here, I'm writing off all of the US.

But if you're there... yeah, that anger seems justified. When the shit that's about to happen happens don't let them hide behind the blame game.

Not being American, I will need some convincing about why the US doesn't belong in the same bucket as, say, Hungary or Turkey. If you keep self inflicting the rule of strongmen and their oligarch cronies at some point that's a core feature.

I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media... kind of exhausting, honestly, but it's still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so... maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I'll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it's going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so...

See, there's the horrifying possibility that they just did and this is what Americans are.

Eh, forget it. they probably need a minute before reckoning with that one.

I very much support Ukraine in the war, but... yeah, that's horrifying. Just on a human level.

I mean, some of those end on a closeup of somebody's face. That's up there as some of the most haunting shit I've ever seen. I'll be thinking about that for a very long time.

Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

That's the argument.

That is the least serious argument I believe I've ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

I mean, don't get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.

I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.

So... "vote for whoever" seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.