alt Hacker News> It'll be very interesting to see how this space matures over the next several years, and whether the niche of specialized low-power NPUs survives in PCs or if NVIDIA's approach of only using the GPU wins out.
GPU's are gaining their own kinds of specialized blocks such as matrix/tensor compute units, or BVH acceleration for ray-tracing (that may or may not turn out to be useful for other stuff). So I'm not sure that there's any real distinction from that POV - a specialized low-power unit in an iGPU is going to be practically indistinguishable from a NPU, except that it will probably be easier to target from existing GPU API's.
> a specialized low-power unit in an iGPU is going to be practically indistinguishable from a NPU, except that it will probably be easier to target from existing GPU API's.
Possibly, depending on how low the power actually is. We can't really tell from NVIDIA's tensor cores, because waking up an NVIDIA discrete GPU at all has a higher power cost than running an NPU. Intel's iGPUs have matrix units, but I'm not sure if they can match their NPU on power or performance.