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by krooj 158 days ago
Question - from the perspective of the actual silicon, are these NPUs just another form of SIMD? If so, that's laughable sleight of hand and the circuits will be relegated to some mothball footnote in the same manner as AVX512, etc.

To be fair, SIMD made a massive difference for early multimedia PCs for things like music playback, gaming, and composited UIs.
2 comments
adastra22 158 days ago
> circuits will be relegated to some mothball footnote in the same manner as AVX512

AVX512 is widely used...

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kristianp 157 days ago
Not on Intel consumer CPUs.
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zozbot234 158 days ago
NPUs are a separate accelerator block, not in-CPU SIMD. The latter exists for matrix compute, but only in the latest version of AVX which has yet to reach consumer CPUs.
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aleph_minus_one 158 days ago
> The latter exists for matrix compute, but only in the latest version of AVX which has yet to reach consumer CPUs.

As far as I am aware, AMD implemented has implemented many parts of AVX-512 in their consumer CPUs since Zen 4:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AVX-512&oldid=133...

On the other hand, Intel still does not support AVX-512 in Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Lake

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_Lake_(microprocessor)

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