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Framework boosts its 13-inch laptop with new CPUs, lower prices, and better screens
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Because the NPUs were designed and built and included long before Windows 11's AI features were announced?
If I recall correctly, it typically takes about 4 years for a CPU to go from design to distribution.
Meteor Lake was taped out in May 2021 and launched in December 2023. Still much slower than the pace of LLM development, to be fair. It seems more like an "if you build it, they will come" approach. But that's also how we got stuck with (for most consumer purposes) useless tensor cores on our GPUs. Does anyone even give a shit about raytracing/DLSS anymore?
It actually sounds like Microsoft is betraying Intel for Qualcomm, since their upcoming processor in the new Surface tablet is the only one that actually meets the requirements. So it looks like Microsoft doesn't give two shits about supporting existing hardware either way.
Tensor cores can be used to play chess, generate images, do realistic text to speech, do noise cancellation, content-aware fill, etc.
They are only useless to you and other people with no imagination
Chess engines have outplayed humans for thirty years, and they didn't need teraflops of computing power to do it.
Generative AI is actively harmful to the environment, slowing the phase-out of coal in the US and guzzling billions of gallons of water. It's likely going to kill jobs and it's already filling the internet and the academic world with garbage. It's also likely a bubble that will burst before long, potentially bringing the economy down with it.
I'll give you noise cancellation and text-to-speech, that's pretty cool.
But personally, I'd rather have more CUDA cores.
That middle paragraph is very misleading. It's Generative AI as a service that is actively harmful to the environment. Having a 15 W chip to do tasks like erasing objects from a photo is not any more harmful to the environment than a GPU that uses 15W. In fact, NPUs can be more efficient at some tasks than GPUs.
The problem is opening your phone/browser, and being able to call on demand GPT-4 to wake up a cluster of 128 Nvidia A100s operating at around 300-400W each. That's 51.2 kW.
Now you can draw some positives and negatives from that figure, such as
I don't need to outplay humans, I need to see the optimal line to analyze it. Chess is still not solved, so Leela Zero is still helpful because it's giving better advice than older engines. Even Stockfish went neural network, but a smaller one that reads deeper. They still can't tell us if the game from the start ends in a draw like checkers.
Killing jobs is good. It's already freeing people from having to write things like promotional emails. Maybe they are sad they don't have a job anymore, but unemployment if 4%, hardly difficult to get a different one. It's not an important job anyway, I wouldn't feel creative to write about a labor day sale or whatever
I’m so curious to see how a Qualcomm gambit plays out for Microsoft.
With the ethos at Qualcomm being support a chip for 1 year, then move on, I have trouble believing they’ll update the drivers for a major windows release
Google browbeat them for nearly 10 years, and then ended up going with the majority Samsung designed chip called Tensor just to compete against Apple in years of updates