> while NPUs might lower power consumption slightly, the innovation is more about incremental efficiency than offering meaningful new capabilities. Efficiency

> while NPUs might lower power consumption slightly, the innovation is more about incremental efficiency than offering meaningful new capabilities. Efficiency is more important than performance, for most people other than hardcore PC gamers. It's what makes the fans not spin up and make a racket and what determines battery life. Performance was mostly good enough 6 years ago, although it is exciting to see the continued improvements. AI is always evolving but we already have tons of useful models with lots of room to do more with the same old designs. Some NPUs can probably run a neural video codec, which would solve the HW decode problem once and for all, no more dedicated single function decoders, and we could do things like voice over extreme low bandwidth radio links. Also, are they actually expensive? Seems like lots of cheap boards have them now.