4 ms·

AMD marketing is hoping the “AI” branding is a positive. Antidotally, I know many consumers who are not sold on AI. This branding could actually hurt sales.

by cebert 7mo ago

himata4113 7mo ago
I'd actually love to have an NPU that isn't useless on my 285k.
aljgz 7mo ago
We are dealing with a hype, but the reality is that AI would change everything we do. Local models will start being helpful in [more] unobtrusive ways. Machines with decent local NPUs would be usable for longer before they feel too slow.
- wood_spirit 7mo ago
  So I’ve got a lot warmer to believing that AI can be a better programmer than most programmers these days. That is a low bar :). The current approach to AI can definitely change how effective a programmer is: but then it is up to the market to decide if we need so many programmers. The talk about how each company is going to keep all the existing programmers and just expect productivity multipliers is just what execs are currently telling programmers; that might change when the same is execs are talking to shareholders etc. But does this extrapolate to the current way of doing AI being in normal life in a good way that ends up being popular? The way Microsoft etc is trying to put AI in everything is kinda saying no it isn’t actually what users want. I’d like voice control in my PC or phone. That’s a use for these NPUs. But I imagine it is like AR- what we all want until it arrives and it’s meh.
  - snovv_crash 7mo ago
    When I interview people for a job I'm not looking to hire an average programmer, though.
    - shiroiuma 7mo ago
      You want to hire an above-average programmer, I assume. Do you also pay above-average salaries?
      - snovv_crash 7mo ago
        People are not uniform fungible programmers. I want someone who is a specialist and above average at the stuff I'm trying to do. If that specialization commands a higher market rate than average, then yes, that's what they get paid.
- vbezhenar 7mo ago
  For some people maybe. I don't want to use local AI and NPU will be dead weight for me. Can't imagine a single task in my workflow that would benefit from AI. It's similar to performance/effiency cores. I don't need power efficiency and I'd actually buy CPU that doesn't make that distinction.
  - orbital-decay 7mo ago
    Also similar to GPU + CPU on the same die, yet here we are. In a sense, AI is already in every x86 CPU for many years, and you already benefit from using it locally (branch prediction in modern processors is ML-based).
    - wtallis 7mo ago
      > Also similar to GPU + CPU on the same die, yet here we are. I think the overall trend is now moving somewhat away from having the CPU and GPU on one die. Intel's been splitting things up into several chiplets for most of their recent generations of processors, AMD's desktop processors have been putting the iGPU on a different die than the CPU cores for both of the generations that have an iGPU, their high-end mobile part does the same, even NVIDIA has done it that way. Where we still see monolithic SoCs as a single die is mostly smaller, low-power parts used in devices that wouldn't have the power budget for a discrete GPU. But as this article shows, sometimes those mobile parts get packaged for a desktop socket to fill a hole in the product line without designing an entirely new piece of silicon.
  - fodkodrasz 7mo ago
    Never wanted to do high quality voice recognition? No need for face/object detection in near instant speed for your photos, embedding based indexing and RAG for your local documents with free text search where synonyms also work? All locally, real-time, with minimal energy use. That is fine. Most ordinary users can benefit from these very basic use cases which can be accelerated. Guess people also said this for video encoding acceleration, and now they use it on a daily basis for video conferencing, for example.
    - 7mo ago
- ezst 7mo ago
  > the reality is that AI would change everything we do Your true believer convictions don't matter here. Those AI accelerators are merely just marketing stunts. They won't help your local inference because they are not general purpose enough for that, they are too weak to be impactful, most people won't ever run local inference because it sucks and is a resource hog most can't afford, and it goes against the interests of those scammy unprofitable corporations who are selling us LLMs as AI as the silver bullet to every problem and got us there in the first place (they are already successful in that, by making computing unaffordable). There's little to no economical and functional meaning to those NPUs.
  - otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
    > most people won't ever run local inference because it sucks and is a resource hog most can't afford a) Local inference for chats sucks. Using LLMs for chatting is stupid though. b) Local inference is cheap if you're not selling a general-purpose chatbot. There's lots of fun stuff you can get with a local LLM that previously wasn't economically possible. Two big ones are gaming (for example, text adventure games or complex board games like Magic the Gathering) and office automation (word processors, excel tables).
    - g947o 7mo ago
      > There's lots of fun stuff Ask your friends or a small business owner if they are going to spend $1k on a new laptop because "there's lots of fun stuff". For office automation, you'll get a lot more mileage with Claude and similar.
      - vel0city 7mo ago
        > Ask your friends or a small business owner if they are going to spend $1k on a new laptop because "there's lots of fun stuff". Do people not buy gaming PCs and game consoles? Isn't that buying something because "there's lots of fun stuff?" And while sure a business owner wouldn't be buying it for "fun stuff", if it was about being able to run the AI tools they want without the business risk of sending your most important data and intellectual property to an AI provider wouldn't some think about it?
- saithound 7mo ago
  This is irrelevant when the question is whether marketing your CPU with "AI" will help sales. Toilets also changed everything we do and are helpful in unobtrusive ways, but that won't make the "Ryzen Crapper" a customer favorite.
- g947o 7mo ago
  Your comment is almost completely irrelevant to what the parent is saying. "AI would change everything we do" has nothing to do with "This new chip along with bloat from Windows enables new workflows for you". If you have been paying attention, you'd know that NPUs from these new CPUs barely made any difference from a consumer's perspective.
- upboundspiral 7mo ago
  I am bullish on AI being used in all sorts of useful and discreet and non-discreet ways in the present and future. However I am exceedingly skeptical of NPUs being some winning bet. No one is running LLMs on current gen NPUs so if we will in the future its a long time coming. Unless they can demonstrate some real (and not marketing) wins I remain skeptical that a large NPU for LLMs is the future. I can totally see NPU accelerating simple tasks, but to be worth the silicon they have a ways to go imo. 99% of people don't need or want a dev workstation. My travel laptop is 7+ years old and I couldn't tell you the difference between it and a current flagship in terms of browsing and everyday tasks. I will not lie, I find LLMs useful but the desktop experience is pretty polished already. NPUs seem to be an attempt to ride the AI bandwagon with very little to show for it so far.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  I see a lot of people put so much stock in a future of local models, but I am not convinced we’re on track for a world where most people are running local models. Especially when you have companies like Microsoft explicitly trying to make a world people don’t even own their software/hardware anymore and do everything on the cloud.
skirmish 7mo ago
Indeed, I was buying a laptop for my wife, and she was viscerally against "Ryzen AI": I don't want a CPU with builtin AI to spy on my screen all the time!
kijin 7mo ago
They can just buy a regular Ryzen 9000 series CPU, then. Maybe add a real graphics card if they're into gaming.
shakna 7mo ago
Or hoping to get ahead of the Windows 12 requirements.
PunchyHamster 7mo ago
Doubt it, and competition does the same so not like they are going intel coz of that
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 7mo ago
Well, as long as it's one product of many, they may be able to segment the market and suffer no drawback.

AMD marketing is hoping the “AI” branding is a positive. Antidotally, I know many consumers who are not sold on AI. This branding could actually hurt sales.

by cebert 7mo ago

AMD marketing is hoping the “AI” branding is a positive. Antidotally, I know many consumers who are not sold on AI. This branding could actually hurt sales.

himata4113 7mo ago

I'd actually love to have an NPU that isn't useless on my 285k.

aljgz 7mo ago

We are dealing with a hype, but the reality is that AI would change everything we do. Local models will start being helpful in [more] unobtrusive ways. Machines with decent local NPUs would be usable for longer before they feel too slow.

wood_spirit 7mo ago
So I’ve got a lot warmer to believing that AI can be a better programmer than most programmers these days. That is a low bar :). The current approach to AI can definitely change how effective a programmer is: but then it is up to the market to decide if we need so many programmers. The talk about how each company is going to keep all the existing programmers and just expect productivity multipliers is just what execs are currently telling programmers; that might change when the same is execs are talking to shareholders etc. But does this extrapolate to the current way of doing AI being in normal life in a good way that ends up being popular? The way Microsoft etc is trying to put AI in everything is kinda saying no it isn’t actually what users want. I’d like voice control in my PC or phone. That’s a use for these NPUs. But I imagine it is like AR- what we all want until it arrives and it’s meh.
- snovv_crash 7mo ago
  When I interview people for a job I'm not looking to hire an average programmer, though.
  - shiroiuma 7mo ago
    You want to hire an above-average programmer, I assume. Do you also pay above-average salaries?
    - snovv_crash 7mo ago
      People are not uniform fungible programmers. I want someone who is a specialist and above average at the stuff I'm trying to do. If that specialization commands a higher market rate than average, then yes, that's what they get paid.
vbezhenar 7mo ago
For some people maybe. I don't want to use local AI and NPU will be dead weight for me. Can't imagine a single task in my workflow that would benefit from AI. It's similar to performance/effiency cores. I don't need power efficiency and I'd actually buy CPU that doesn't make that distinction.
- orbital-decay 7mo ago
  Also similar to GPU + CPU on the same die, yet here we are. In a sense, AI is already in every x86 CPU for many years, and you already benefit from using it locally (branch prediction in modern processors is ML-based).
  - wtallis 7mo ago
    > Also similar to GPU + CPU on the same die, yet here we are. I think the overall trend is now moving somewhat away from having the CPU and GPU on one die. Intel's been splitting things up into several chiplets for most of their recent generations of processors, AMD's desktop processors have been putting the iGPU on a different die than the CPU cores for both of the generations that have an iGPU, their high-end mobile part does the same, even NVIDIA has done it that way. Where we still see monolithic SoCs as a single die is mostly smaller, low-power parts used in devices that wouldn't have the power budget for a discrete GPU. But as this article shows, sometimes those mobile parts get packaged for a desktop socket to fill a hole in the product line without designing an entirely new piece of silicon.
- fodkodrasz 7mo ago
  Never wanted to do high quality voice recognition? No need for face/object detection in near instant speed for your photos, embedding based indexing and RAG for your local documents with free text search where synonyms also work? All locally, real-time, with minimal energy use. That is fine. Most ordinary users can benefit from these very basic use cases which can be accelerated. Guess people also said this for video encoding acceleration, and now they use it on a daily basis for video conferencing, for example.
  - 7mo ago
ezst 7mo ago
> the reality is that AI would change everything we do Your true believer convictions don't matter here. Those AI accelerators are merely just marketing stunts. They won't help your local inference because they are not general purpose enough for that, they are too weak to be impactful, most people won't ever run local inference because it sucks and is a resource hog most can't afford, and it goes against the interests of those scammy unprofitable corporations who are selling us LLMs as AI as the silver bullet to every problem and got us there in the first place (they are already successful in that, by making computing unaffordable). There's little to no economical and functional meaning to those NPUs.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
  > most people won't ever run local inference because it sucks and is a resource hog most can't afford a) Local inference for chats sucks. Using LLMs for chatting is stupid though. b) Local inference is cheap if you're not selling a general-purpose chatbot. There's lots of fun stuff you can get with a local LLM that previously wasn't economically possible. Two big ones are gaming (for example, text adventure games or complex board games like Magic the Gathering) and office automation (word processors, excel tables).
  - g947o 7mo ago
    > There's lots of fun stuff Ask your friends or a small business owner if they are going to spend $1k on a new laptop because "there's lots of fun stuff". For office automation, you'll get a lot more mileage with Claude and similar.
    - vel0city 7mo ago
      > Ask your friends or a small business owner if they are going to spend $1k on a new laptop because "there's lots of fun stuff". Do people not buy gaming PCs and game consoles? Isn't that buying something because "there's lots of fun stuff?" And while sure a business owner wouldn't be buying it for "fun stuff", if it was about being able to run the AI tools they want without the business risk of sending your most important data and intellectual property to an AI provider wouldn't some think about it?
saithound 7mo ago
This is irrelevant when the question is whether marketing your CPU with "AI" will help sales. Toilets also changed everything we do and are helpful in unobtrusive ways, but that won't make the "Ryzen Crapper" a customer favorite.
g947o 7mo ago
Your comment is almost completely irrelevant to what the parent is saying. "AI would change everything we do" has nothing to do with "This new chip along with bloat from Windows enables new workflows for you". If you have been paying attention, you'd know that NPUs from these new CPUs barely made any difference from a consumer's perspective.
upboundspiral 7mo ago
I am bullish on AI being used in all sorts of useful and discreet and non-discreet ways in the present and future. However I am exceedingly skeptical of NPUs being some winning bet. No one is running LLMs on current gen NPUs so if we will in the future its a long time coming. Unless they can demonstrate some real (and not marketing) wins I remain skeptical that a large NPU for LLMs is the future. I can totally see NPU accelerating simple tasks, but to be worth the silicon they have a ways to go imo. 99% of people don't need or want a dev workstation. My travel laptop is 7+ years old and I couldn't tell you the difference between it and a current flagship in terms of browsing and everyday tasks. I will not lie, I find LLMs useful but the desktop experience is pretty polished already. NPUs seem to be an attempt to ride the AI bandwagon with very little to show for it so far.
Forgeties79 7mo ago
I see a lot of people put so much stock in a future of local models, but I am not convinced we’re on track for a world where most people are running local models. Especially when you have companies like Microsoft explicitly trying to make a world people don’t even own their software/hardware anymore and do everything on the cloud.

skirmish 7mo ago

Indeed, I was buying a laptop for my wife, and she was viscerally against "Ryzen AI": I don't want a CPU with builtin AI to spy on my screen all the time!

kijin 7mo ago

They can just buy a regular Ryzen 9000 series CPU, then. Maybe add a real graphics card if they're into gaming.

shakna 7mo ago

Or hoping to get ahead of the Windows 12 requirements.

PunchyHamster 7mo ago

Doubt it, and competition does the same so not like they are going intel coz of that

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 7mo ago

Well, as long as it's one product of many, they may be able to segment the market and suffer no drawback.