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twitexplore • today at 6:17 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Yes, but still, what about users looking for NPU support. What happened to Microsoft's copilot+ PC campaign? (the NPU hardware, not the logo key and ad campaign) AMD's XDNA2 NPU is best supported by ONNX, I think Qualcomm Hexagon is too. The best consumer unified architectures are Apple, AMD ai+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, even intel has an NPU offering.


Replies

d2kx • today at 6:27 PM

NPUs are meant for tiny, tiny models that can run basically at all times but cannot affect battery life (e.g. translation, live-video cleanup, filesearch etc.), not for big LLMs. This is about 500 times to large for a NPU.

BlackRabbit1 • today at 6:39 PM

NPUs you can find in AMD high-end CPUs are closer to specialized DSPs (basically big VLIW/SIMD vector units).

People love doing heavy math stuff with them (https://destevez.net/2026/05/getting-peak-tops-on-a-ryzen-ai... - not my blog)

HarHarVeryFunny • today at 7:06 PM

There are plenty of smaller less powerful open weights models if all you have to run it on is an NPU.

This is a much larger more powerful model, so running it locally will not be for everyone, but you can still run it via a hosting service such as Fireworks AI.

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fg137 • today at 9:13 PM

Copilot+ PC is such a terrible and wasteful marketing effort that Microsoft has given it up.

NPUs are not inherently useless, but definitely so the way they are forced onto users machines.