We don't ask that question. In reality everything is done in the cloud. Maybe they package some camera app that applies snapchat-like filters with NPUs, but that's about the extent of it.
Jokes aside: they really seem to do some things like live captions and translations. Pretty sure you could also do these things on the iGPU or CPU at a higher power draw.
No for sure, but afaik you get all of those features even if you don't have an NPU. And even if you do have one, it's unclear to me which one of them actually use the NPU for extra power or if they all just run on the CPU. Like the thing that is missing for me is "this is the thing that you can only do on a Copilot PC and it's not available otherwise".
Oh boy, instead of building an efficient index or optimizing the start menu or its built-in web browser, they're adding more power usage to make the computer randomly guess what I want returned since they still can't figure out how to return search results of what you actually typed.
It is another way Microsoft has tried to cater to OEMs as means to bring PC sales back to the glory exponential growth days, especially under the CoPilot+ PC branding, nowadays still siloed into Windows ARM.
In fairness NPUs can use less hardware resources than a general purpose discrete GPU, thus better for laptop workloads, however we all know that if a discrete GPU is available, there is not a technical reason for not using it, assuming enough local memory is available.
Ah, and NPUs are yet another thing that GNU/Linux folks would have to reverse engineer as well, as on Windows/Android/Apple OSes they are exposed via OS APIs, and there is yet no industry standard for them.
Jokes aside: they really seem to do some things like live captions and translations. Pretty sure you could also do these things on the iGPU or CPU at a higher power draw.
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/12/18/releasi...