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Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but

Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act. The Core Ultra lineup is supposed to be low-power, low-heat, right? If you want more compute power, pick something from a different product series.

wtallis 10mo ago
> Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act. I think that "dark silicon" mentality is mostly lingering trauma from when the industry first hit a wall with the end of Dennard scaling. These days, it's quite clear that you can have a chip that's more or less fully utilized, certainly with no "dark" blocks that are as large as a NPU. You just need to have the ability to run the chip at lower clock speeds to stay within power and thermal constraints—something that was not well-developed in 2005's processors. For the kind of parallel compute that GPUs and NPUs tackle, adding more cores but running them at lower clock speeds and lower voltages usually does result in better efficiency in practice. The real answer to the GPU vs NPU question isn't that the GPU couldn't grow, but that the NPU has a drastically different architecture making very different power vs performance tradeoffs that theoretically give it a niche of use cases where the NPU is a better choice than the GPU for some inference tasks.