“AI infused at every layer“
Okay… What does that even mean? And why does the company think we want that?
I love me some AI, but right now it’s getting put on everything like Nutella at a hipster eatery.
Okay… What does that even mean? And why does the company think we want that?
I love me some AI, but right now it’s getting put on everything like Nutella at a hipster eatery.
For example, some of the latest Intel Xeon CPUs have 8x 1KB registers that can perform only one operation: matrix multiply (and accumulate results). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Matrix_Extensions
Generally this is very similar to the Vista-era Microsoft requirements for PC manufacturers, where it was a logo requirement to include a GPU that could be used to accelerate composition in the desktop window manager, such as transparency effects and blur. (Prior to that, low-end PCs had "graphics cards" that were fixed pipeline and not programmable /general purpose.)
Now Microsoft is forcing PC manufacturers to do the same kind of thing, but instead of a GPU it's now an "NPU" that they have to include. This can be a CPU instruction set, a co-processor, or a GPU baseline capability. The requirement is 40 teraoperations per second.
IMHO, 40 TOPS is way too low, and doesn't focus enough on memory bandwidth. Also, that 40 is total across CPU+GPU+NPU, which means in practice it'll require fiddly optimisation to get anywhere near that level of performance.
Windows Vista had the same issue, where many low-end laptops especially would struggle and spin up their GPU fans just from desktop workloads, let alone gaming...
For an ultra-mobile tablet or laptop, this is... reasonable, I suppose.
For a desktop, it's quite a bit behind the current-gen tech, let alone "the future".
Like I was saying, this is aiming for where the puck was, not where the puck will be.
It's the same thing as Vista GPU requirements. Vendors will do the bare minimum that ticks the checkbox, but in practice it'll be useless garbage.
Modern AIs require > 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, > 128 GB memory capacity, and > 1,000 TOPS of compute to be really usable locally, not just technically capable of "running".
"AI infused at every layer" is like saying "we build our software with the best Agile(tm) practices". The customer doesn't care how you built the software, the customer cares what your software will do for them, and all "AI" means is "we probably have a deep learning inference engine somewhere under the hood, but no promises".
Companies were selling "Media PC's", and Windows ME stood for Millennium Edition or Media Edition depending on who you asked.
And people think the word "content" is overused now...
This "AI" bullshit is just another nail in the already nailed shut coffin.
LPSTR do_thing(LPSTR prompt);
if (do_thing("get a mutex or whatever it's called") == do_thing("What's the happy return code for getting a mutex?") { ... }