The AI sector is booming, and AMD is exploding on the CPU front. As we’ve seen, the company will be proposing a new driver to enable local operation of LLM models managing up to 128 billion parameters. Now we learn that the Reds want to offer NPUs in the form of PCIe cards!
NPUs in daughterboard form, that’s AMD’s idea!
Once upon a time, when NVIDIA’s PhysX technology was starting to arrive, the Ageia brand offered PCIe cards designed to boost performance on the technology. So, if you had an ATI card, you could enjoy the effects of PhysX thanks to the card in question. This little aside serves to illustrate the approach AMD intends to take.
Currently, only laptop processors are equipped with neural processors, leaving desktop machines out in the cold. Yes, you can run AI on a PC without an NPU, but it won’t always be fast. With an NPU in the form of an add-on card, you’ll be able to enjoy higher performance than on a laptop. Complex LLMs can then be handled, with all that, locally. However, you will need to plan for a high quantity of RAM in your PC, this kind of use if very memory hungry.
Of course, the question is whether you would buy such a product, and at what price. As it stands, it’s likely to appeal more to industry professionals than to gamers. The other question we’re asking concerns users of Copilot+ certified machines: how many of them actually use the AI’s capabilities? It’s all well and good to say that “sales of AI PCs are exploding”, but if all new machines are equipped with NPU-enabled CPUs, sales will inevitably rise!