https://www.pcworld.com/article/2411004/benchmarked-amds-ryzen-ai-300-brings-serious-performance-to-copilot-laptops.html
We dive into the benchmarks to show how AMD's new Zen 5-based Ryzen AI 300 does against Intel's Core Ultra and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite
It's the kind of thing that in a few years you'll be glad to have because some tasks will be offloaded from the GPU to the NPU, one I can think of is the background blur in video conferencing software or microphone noise suppression
GPUs are already good at those things. But NPUs can be better at those things - and probably more energy efficient too - given optimized domain-specific models to work with.
This but unironically. I'm obsessed with off-grid, low power processing. I don't want a stupid fucking NPU I won't need nor use.
Then don't get one? I don't use tampons bit I don't feel the need to yell about not buying them
That's still something that works more than good enough without the use of an NPU. We'll see if better use cases come out in future but I'd still prefer that power and die area go to raw CPU processing power.
You're likely already paying for silicon you don't use. Take AVX512 instructions (or other more exotic instructions) for example, or unused PCIe lanes, certain encoders on your GPU etc.
Also, people thinking they have no use for an NPU are almost certainly already using them, for example when taking a photo with their phone.
The closest thing is probably the 7840HS, 7940HS or the U variants (same thing at a lower TDP so slightly slower). The 8945HS, 8845HS, etc. are very similar but with a better NPU, which you won't want to pay for (and which still doesn't quite meet Copilot specs), so the 7xxx ones are better value. The performance of the AI 300 looks very similar to the 7940HS. Power efficiency may be better in the new one though.
I know they gotta do this to remain competitive and not concede that entire market subsection, but this is just one more product I won't be buying.
Until AI can build me a custom wooden desk or mow my lawn (there's already robots that do that), it's just a novelty.
This article is just more like about benchmarks of Ryzen AI 300 vs Snapdragon X Elite vs Intel Ultra, not more than that.
Run Linux. Use KDE desktop for windows 7 like experience - I stopped using windows 7 years ago - as long as you don't trap yourself in garbage popular distro like Ubuntu or Debian - you'll be fine. Install Fedora with KDE, or Manjaro. After some learning curve (no disk mounting by default, wtf?) it does it's job pretty damn good, (unless you don't play games with anticheat ect.)
You’re right about “run Linux” but not sure what you’re on about with “trap yourself in garbage popular distro like Ubuntu or Debian” there.
Those distros are just fine; like anything else, use what is best for you, no reason to be negative.
I used Ubuntu initially - These distros aren't fine. Time wasted on fixing problems I shouldn't need to fix is wasted forever. It was a never ending stream of issues that wasted countless hours of my life
So two of the most popular if not the top two most used Linux distros, are bad and not fine? Odd that such a large amount of users would continue to use something so unstable. Maybe it wasn't the distro's fault?
Odd indeed. These distros have outdated libraries, and things just dont work out of the box - it can be an absolute nightmare for a new user. Also Canonical once screwed up components of the Ubuntu by sheer incompetence, and didn't bother to fix them until next release 6 months later. Suggesting it to noobs is straight way to convert them back to windows
The performance looks surprisingly close to the older 7940HS. Both look good. Shame they didn't do a battery comparison between these two. The 7940HS doesn't meet the Copilot requirements in it's NPU, but I bet must people don't care about that.