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by my123 354 days ago
Tensor is essentially shipping subpar hardware with not even taking care of software properly.

https://ai.google.dev/edge/litert/android/npu/overview has been identical for a year+ now.

In practice Qualcomm and MediaTek ship working NPU SDKs for third party developers, NNAPI doesn't count and is deprecated anyway.
1 comments
refulgentis 354 days ago
Man this is a funny situation. Ty for sharing, more or less confirms my understanding. Couldn't quite believe it when I was in Google, or out of Google. This should be a big scandal afaict. What is going on???

(n.b. to readers, if you click through, the Google Pixel Tensor API is coming soon. So why in the world has Google been selling Tensor chips in Pixel as some big AI play since...idk, at least 2019?)

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my123 354 days ago
Yes, you can use first-party models on the Pixel NPUs or you're stuck with NNAPI which is self-admittedly deprecated by Google and doesn't work all that well.

On third party model workloads, this is what you will get:

https://ai-benchmark.com/ranking.html

https://browser.geekbench.com/ai-benchmarks (NPU tab, sort w/ quantisation and/or half precision)

Google is clearly not serious on Pixels in practice, and the GPU performance is also behind by quite a lot compared to flagships, which really doesn't help. CPUs are also behind by quite a lot too...

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