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AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU


I’ve long been a fan of Qualcomm’s NPUs, and I even collaborated with them to get experimental support for the underlying HVX DSP into TensorFlow back in 2017 (traces remain here). That…

I’ve long been a fan of Qualcomm’s NPUs, and I even collaborated with them to get experimental support for the underlying HVX DSP into TensorFlow back in 2017 (traces remain here). To try to get to the bottom of these issues, I’ve open sourced a benchmark where I try to get the best possible performance on a foundational AI operation, multiplying two large matrices, and show that the NPU is slower than the CPU path. I also miss the ability to compile and run my own operations on the DSP, since that would provide an escape hatch to these issues, but that’s apparently not allowed on Windows.

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