Comment by r2vcap

I get the impression that https://github.com/pytorch/executorch is Meta’s take on TFLite / LiteRT, which is quite interesting.

While reading the README and related documentation, I noticed that Samsung Exynos NPU acceleration was listed, which immediately caught my attention. According to https://docs.pytorch.org/executorch/main/backends/samsung/sa..., Samsung has finally built and released an NPU SDK—so I followed the link to check it out.

Unfortunately, the experience was disappointing.

The so-called “version 1.0” SDK is available only for Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04. There is no release date information per version, nor any visible roadmap. Even worse, downloading the SDK requires logging in. The product description page itself https://soc-developer.semiconductor.samsung.com/global/devel... does contain explanations, but they are provided almost entirely as images rather than text—presented in a style more reminiscent of corporate PR material than developer-facing technical documentation.

This is, regrettably, very typical of Samsung’s software support: opaque documentation, gated access, and little consideration for external developers. At this point, it is hard not to conclude that Exynos remains a poor choice, regardless of its theoretical hardware capabilities.

For comparison, Qualcomm and MediaTek actively collaborate with existing ecosystems, and their SDKs are generally available without artificial barriers. As a concrete example, see how LiteRT distributes its artifacts and references in this commit: https://github.com/google-ai-edge/LiteRT/commit/eaf7d635e1bc...