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by catgary 300 days ago
From what I can tell, NPUs are mostly being used by Microsoft to encourage vendor lock-in to the MicrosoftML/ONNX platform (similar to their DirectX playbook).
2 comments
jonas21 300 days ago
They're used a lot on mobile. Apple uses their "neural engine" NPU to power their on-device ML stuff and Samsung does something similar in their Exynos processors. Apple also exposes the NPU to developers via CoreML.
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pjmlp 299 days ago
Extension spaghetti is hardly any better, just because it says the same API name on the tin.

Google and Apple have been doing NPUs for a while now.

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bigyabai 299 days ago
Yeah, and the NPUs have displaced approximately 0% of the hardware demand for Nvidia products. Real snipe chase they've commit to.

Extension spaghetti is fine, I'd much rather end up with AI acceleration being handled like Vulkan than suffering a fate like Metal or DirectX.

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pjmlp 299 days ago
Failure to understand why developers chose CUDA, is exactly why NVidia keeps selling.

Same applies to proprietary 3D APIs.

There is a reason why only FOSS devs make such big fuss out of APIs, while professional game studios keep talk about how to take each hardware to its limits at GDC, since 8 bit heterogeneous home game systems.

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