I have a sneaking suspicion that the real real reason for an NPU is marketing. "Oh look, NVDA is worth $3.3T - let's make sure we stick some AI stuff in our products too."
Most of these small NPUs are actually made for CNNs and other models where "stream data through weights" applies. They have a huge speedup there. When you stream weights across data (any LLM or other large model), you are almost certain to be bound by memory bandwidth.
* On CPU: SIMD NEON
* On CPU: custom matrix multiply accelerator, separate from SIMD unit
* On CPU package: NPU
* GPU
The M processors changed the game. My teams support 250k users. I went from 50 MacBooks in 2020 to over 10,000 today. I added zero staff - we manage them like iPhones.
The M processor really did completely eliminate all sense of “lag” for basic computing (web browsing, restarting your computer, etc). Everything happens nearly instantly, even on the first generation M1 processor. The experience of “waiting for something to load” went away.
Not to mention these machines easily last 5-10 years.
Even modern macs can be brought to their knees by something that rhymes with FrowdStrike Calcon and interrupts all IO.
In companies where I worked where the IT team rolled out "security" software to the Mac-based developers, their computers were not noticeably faster than Windows PCs at all, especially given the majority of containers are still linux/amd64, reflecting the actual deployment environment. Meanwhile Windows also runs on ARM anyway, so it's not really something useful to generalize about.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-add-a-file-...
There are also insurance, compliance, and other constraints that IT folks have that make them unwilling to turn off scanning for you.
To be fair, the average employee doesn’t have much more than idiot-level knowledge when it comes to security.
The majority of employees would rather turn off automatic OS updates simply because it’s a hassle to restart your computer because god forbid they you loose those 250 chrome tabs waiting for you to never get around to revisiting!
So the pro-part of the tip does not apply.
On my own machines anti-virus is one the very first things to be removed. Most of the time I'd turn off all the swap file, yet Windows doesn't overcommit and certain applications are notorious for allocating memory w/o even using it.
One can bury the machine and lose very little basic interactivity. That part users really like.
Frankly the only downside of the MacBook Air is the tiny storage. The 8GB RAM is actually enough most of the time. But general system storage with only 1/4 TB is cramped consistently.
Been thinking about sending the machine out to one of those upgrade shops...
I could 3d print a couple of brackets and probably lodge a bigger SSD or the smaller form factor eMMC I think and pack it all into a little package one just plugs in. The port extender is currently shaped such that it fits right under the Air tilting it nicely for general use.
The Air only has external USB... still, I don't need to boot from it. The internal one can continue to do that. Storage is storage for most tasks.
So yeah, great deal. And I really wanted to run the new CPU.
Frankly, I can do more and generally faster than I would expect running on those limited resources. It has been a quite nice surprise.
For a lot of what I do, the RAM and storage are enough.
As someone who used windows laptops, I was amazed when I saw someone sitting next to me on a public transit subway on her MacBook Pro editing images on photoshop with just her trackpad. The standard for windows laptops used to be that low (about ten or twelve years ago?) that seeing a MacBook trackpad just woke someone is a part of my permanent memory.
Coffe shops, trains and airports in Europe? Nope, rare animal on tables.
European schools? Most countries parents buy their kids a computer, and most often it is a desktop used by the whole family, or a laptop of some kind running Windows, unless we are talking about the countries where buying Apple isn't an issue on the monthly expenses.
Popular? In Germany, the few times they get displayed on shopping mall stores, they get rountinely discounted, or bundled with something else, until finally they get rid of them.
Valve is heavily dependent on game studios producing Windows games.
I think part of the reason is that we manage Mac pretty strictly now but we're getting there with Linux too.
We also tried to get them to use WSL 1 and 2 but they just laugh at it :) And point at its terrible disk performance and other dealbreakers. Can't blame them.
As a company, if customers are willing to pay a premium for a NPU, or if they are unwilling to buy a product without one, it is not your place to say “hey we don’t really believe in the AI hype so we’re going to sell products people don’t want to prove a point”
If they shove it in every single product and that’s all anyone advertises, whether consumers know it will help them or not, you don’t get a lot of choice.
If you want the latest chip, you’re getting AI stuff. That’s all there is to it.
"How many models to we have without logos?"
"Huh? Why would we do that?"
To some degree I understand it, because as we’ve all noticed computers have pretty much plateaued for the average person. They last much longer. You don’t need to replace them every two years anymore because the software isn’t out stripping them so fast.
AI is the first thing to come along in quite a while that not only needs significant power but it’s just something different. It’s something they can say your old computer doesn’t have that the new one does. Other than being 5% faster or whatever.
So even if people don’t need it, and even if they notice they don’t need it, it’s something to market on.
The stuff up thread about it being the hotness that Wall Street loves is absolutely a thing too.
Microsoft is built around the broken Intel tick/tick model of incremental improvement — they are stuck with OEM shitware that will take years to flush out of the channel. That means for AI, they are stuck with cloud based OpenAI, where NVIDIA has them by the balls and the hyperscalers are all fighting for GPU.
Apple will deliver local AI features as software (the hardware is “free”) at a much higher margin - while Office 365 AI is like $400+ a year per user.
You’ll have people getting iPhones to get AI assisted emails or whatever Apple does that is useful.
The stuff they've been trying to sell AI to the public with is increasingly looking as absurd as every 1978 "you'll store your recipes on the home computer" argument.
AI text became a Human Centipede story: Start with a coherent 10-word sentence, let AI balloon it into five pages of flowery nonsense, send it to someone else, who has their AI smash it back down to 10 meaningful words.
Coding assistance, even as spicy autocorrect, is often a net negative as you have to plow through hallucinations and weird guesses as to what you want but lack the tools to explain to it.
Image generation is already heading rapidly into cringe territory, in part due to some very public social media operations. I can imagine your kids' kids in 2040 finding out they generated AI images in the 2020s and looking at them with the same embarrassment you'd see if they dug out your high-school emo fursona.
There might well be some more "closed-loop" AI applications that make sense. But are they going to be running on every desktop in the world? Or are they going to be mostly used in datacentres and purpose-built embedded devices?
I also wonder how well some of the models and techniques scale down. I know Microsoft pushed a minimum spec to promote a machine as Copilot-ready, but that seems like it's going to be "Vista Basic Ready" redux as people try to run tools designed for datacentres full of Quadro cards, or at least high-end GPUs, on their $299 HP laptop.
Bela Lugosi Died in 1979, and Peter Murphy was onto his next band by 1984.
By 2000 Goth was fully a distant dot in the rear view mirror for the OG's
In 2002, Murphy released *Dust* with Turkish-Canadian composer and producer Mercan Dede, which utilizes traditional Turkish instrumentation and songwriting, abandoning Murphy's previous pop and rock incarnations, and juxtaposing elements from progressive rock, trance, classical music, and Middle Eastern music, coupled with Dede's trademark atmospheric electronics.
That people recalling Goths in that period should beware of thinking that was a source and not an echo.
In 2006 Noel Fielding's Richmond Felicity Avenal was a basement dwelling leftover from many years past.
#Ostrogoth #TwueGoth
People are clearly finding LLM tech useful, and we’re barely scratching the surface.
Local inference does have privacy benefits. I think at the moment it might make sense to send most of queries to a beefy cloud model, and send sensitive queries to a smaller local one.
And I'm pretty sure this is only Introductory pricing. As people get used to it and use it more it won't cover the cost. I think they rely on the gym model currently; many people not using the ai features much. But eventually that will change. Also, many companies figured that out and pull the copilot license from users that don't use it enough.
Nothing would make me happier than to finally be wrong betting against “Siri,” though.
We’re seeing these things in traditional PCs now because Microsoft has demanded it so that Microsoft can use it in Windows 11.
Any use by third party software is a lower priority
I can’t find TDP for Apple’s Neural Engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Engine), but the first version shipped in the iPhone 8, which has a 7 Wh battery, so these are targeting different markets.