Comment by twitexplore
4 days ago
Yes, but still, what about users looking for NPU support. What happened to Microsoft's copilot+ PC campaign? (the NPU hardware, not the logo key and ad campaign) AMD's XDNA2 NPU is best supported by ONNX, I think Qualcomm Hexagon is too. The best consumer unified architectures are Apple, AMD ai+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, even intel has an NPU offering.
NPUs are meant for tiny, tiny models that can run basically at all times but cannot affect battery life (e.g. translation, live-video cleanup, filesearch etc.), not for big LLMs. This is about 500 times to large for a NPU.
NPUs you can find in AMD high-end CPUs are closer to specialized DSPs (basically big VLIW/SIMD vector units).
People love doing heavy math stuff with them (https://destevez.net/2026/05/getting-peak-tops-on-a-ryzen-ai... - not my blog)
There are plenty of smaller less powerful open weights models if all you have to run it on is an NPU.
This is a much larger more powerful model, so running it locally will not be for everyone, but you can still run it via a hosting service such as Fireworks AI.
I was mistaken in my thinking that open models are able to be quantized to run on average consumer hardware, I think they have outgrown that concept.
I guess that's the attraction - that they may be small enough (likely quantized) so that you can run them locally, so there is no privacy issues, and no-one can turn it off, etc, but technically "open weights" is just referring to models, of any size, where they give you the weights (basically give you the model) so you can run it yourself, instead of having to access it via paid API running on some computer that they control.
Copilot+ PC is such a terrible and wasteful marketing effort that Microsoft has given it up.
NPUs are not inherently useless, but definitely so the way they are forced onto users machines.