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cowmixyesterday at 5:00 PM3 repliesview on HN

This sorta reminds me of the lie that was pushed when the Snapdragon X laptops were being released last year. Qualcomm implied the NPU would be used for LLMs — and I bought into the BS without looking into it. I still use a Snapdragon laptop as my daily driver (it's fine) but for running models locally, it's still a joke. Despite Qualcomm's claims about running 13B parameter models, software like LM Studio only runs on CPU with NPU support merely "planned for future updates." XDA The NPU isn't even faster than the CPU for LLMs — it's just more power-efficient for small models, not the big ones people actually want to run. Their GPUs aren't much better for this purpose either. The only hope for LLMs is the Vulkan support on the Snapdragon X — which still is half-baked.


Replies

wmfyesterday at 9:37 PM

AFAIK Windows 11 does use the NPU to run Phi Silica language models and this is available to any app through some API. The models are quite small as you said though.

captainregexyesterday at 5:21 PM

AnythingLLM uses NPU

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nullpoint420yesterday at 5:02 PM

If you don’t mind me asking, what OS do you use on it?

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