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Comment by throwaway293892 | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at Intel until recently. Pat Gelsinger (the prior CEO) had made one of the top goals for 2024 the marketing of the "AI PC".

Every quarter he would have an all company meeting, and people would get to post questions on a site, and they would pick the top voted questions to answer.

I posted mine: "We're well into the year, and I still don't know what an AI PC is and why anyone would want it instead of a CPU+GPU combo. What is an AI PC and why should I want it?" I then pointed out that if a tech guy like me, along with all the other Intel employees I spoke to, cannot answer the basic questions, why would anyone out there want one?

It was one of the top voted questions and got asked. He answered factually, but it still wasn't clear why anyone would want one.

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The only people who are actually paying good money for a PC nowadays are gamers- and they sure as hell aren't paying 3k so that they can use copilot.

Also professionals that need powerful computers ("workstations") in their jobs, like video editing

A lot of them are incorporating AI in their workflow, so making local AI better would be a plus. Unfortunately I don't see this happening unless GPUs come with more VRAM (and AI companies don't want that, and are willing to spend top dollar to hoard RAM)

Assuming you can buy GPU's at a reasonable price.

Or at least they were. I don't know a huge number of gamers, but all of those I know are suddenly making do with what they have due to RAM prices.

So... what was the answer?

Pretty much the same as what you see in the comments here. For certain workloads, NPU is faster than CPU by quite a bit, and I think he gave some detailed examples at the low level (what types of computations are faster, etc).

But nothing that translated to real world end user experience (other than things like live transcription). I recall I specifically asked "Will Stable Diffusion be much faster than a CPU?" in my question.

He did say that the vendors and Microsoft were trying to come up with "killer applications". In other words, "We'll build it, and others will figure out great ways to use it." On the one hand, this makes sense - end user applications are far from Intel's expertise, and it makes sense to delegate to others. But I got the sense Microsoft + OEMs were not good at this either.

> For certain workloads, NPU is faster than CPU by quite a bit

WTF is an NPU ? What kind of instructions does it support ? Can it add 3 and 5 ? Can it compute matrices ?

Neural Processing Unit.

A retarded GPU that does matrix multiplication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_processing_unit

In theory, its your math coprocessor for your 386.

> In theory, its your math coprocessor for your 386.

A math coprocessor, AFAIK, can do much more than matrix multiplications. From my POV, having a separate chip doing a single math operation is (so 1970) lame.

Probably a lot of jargon AI word salad that boiled down to “I’m leaving in Dec. 2024, you guys have fun.”

> I used to work at Intel until recently.

Do you feel your question was the reason this is no longer the case? (Honestly curious, not /s.)

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