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Comment by almosthere

2 days ago

The typical consumer doesn't care about any checkbox feature. They just care if they can play the games they care about and word/email/netflix.

That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix took 1 second per frame to render.

Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app that they DO care about needs local AI.

There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local AI ever.

Even i3 cpu is perfectly fine software decoding 2160p H264, the only consequence is about 2x higher power draw compared to NVidia decoder.