The problem that (local) ai has at the current moment is that its not just a single type of compute, and because of that, breaks usefulness in the pool of what you can do with it.
on the Surface level, “AI” is a mixture of what is essentially FP16, FP8, and INT8 accelerators, and different implementations have been using different ones. NPUs are basically INT8 only, while GPU intensive ones are FP based, making them not inherently cross compatible.
It forces devs to either think of the NPUs themselves with small things (e.g background blur with camera) as there isn’t any consumer level chip with a massive INT8 co processor except for the PS5 Pro (300 TOPS INT8, which compared to laptop cpus, have a 50 TOPs, so on a completely different league, PS5 Pro uses it to upscale)
The problem that (local) ai has at the current moment is that its not just a single type of compute, and because of that, breaks usefulness in the pool of what you can do with it.
on the Surface level, “AI” is a mixture of what is essentially FP16, FP8, and INT8 accelerators, and different implementations have been using different ones. NPUs are basically INT8 only, while GPU intensive ones are FP based, making them not inherently cross compatible.
It forces devs to either think of the NPUs themselves with small things (e.g background blur with camera) as there isn’t any consumer level chip with a massive INT8 co processor except for the PS5 Pro (300 TOPS INT8, which compared to laptop cpus, have a 50 TOPs, so on a completely different league, PS5 Pro uses it to upscale)