Everyone’s talking about NPUs and AI, but AMD just took the lead at a very important time.
also known as trillions of operations per second.
The acronym has quickly become the go-to measurement for expressing the AI horsepower of a system, and the biggest tech companies in the world are duking it out to outdo each other.
Microsoft really kicked things off with the requirement of a 40 TOPS NPU, but AMD just launched its new Strix Point Ryzen AI processors — and they’re the real deal. AMD is the first to launch capable NPUs (neural processing units) in systems that also have discrete GPUs on board — and that’s a game-changer.The battle over TOPS begins
Microsoft’s push into on-device has meant a rapid increase in the performance of NPUs. The new hardware was first introduced in Intel’s Meteor Lake chips, which could handle just 10 TOPS. The acronym is quickly becoming the go-to way to measure the AI horsepower of a system, standing for trillions of operations per second. As it turns out, those 10 TOPS weren’t all that useful in these initial laptops, despite being marketed as “AI PCs.” It just wasn’t enough performance to be favored over the CPU or GPU in most tasks.
The jump to 40 TOPS in Copilot+ PCs is important, especially for background tasks like the new Recall feature. As Microsoft and Qualcomm noted, that NPU is critical to producing devices with long battery life too. That’s because the initial group of laptops under the Copilot+ PC banner all belong to the same class of laptop. These are highly portable MacBook Air competitors meant for light work on the go.
But let’s get real — the most powerful AI PC in the world is never going to be a device without a powerful GPU. Despite what Microsoft has been saying, GPUs remain the most important component in raw AI performance. Modern graphics cards have loads of AI power under the hood, thanks to the Nvidia’s heavy investment in the technology early on.
