These processors have NPU (Neural Processing Unit) which is supposed to accelerate some small local neural networks. Nvidia RTX GPUs have much more powerful NPUs, so it's more about laptops without discrete GPU.
The latest Ryzen mobile CPU line didn't improve performance compared to its predecessor (the integrated GPU is actually worse), and I think the NPU is to blame.
(Also, the NPUs usually aren't any more separate from the GPU than tensor cores are separate from an Nvidia GPU, they are integrated with the CPU and iGPU.)
The general problem with NPUs for memory-limited tasks is either that the throughput available to them is too low to begin with, or that they're usually constrained to formats that will require wasteful padding/dequantizing when read (at least for newer models) whereas a GPU just does that in local registers.
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...
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.
https://www.khronos.org/events/building-the-foundation-for-a...
Maybe these people aren't that creative....