[pjmlp]

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.

[vbezhenar]

It's open source:

https://github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...

[pjmlp]

That is not an industry standard that works across vendors in an OS and GPU agnostic way, which is why Khronos has started a new standard effort.

https://www.khronos.org/events/building-the-foundation-for-a...