Re: choosing a motherboard

On 3/28/2024 9:07 PM, John B. Smith wrote:

> And also, if you read between my lines, I kinda got a stupid yen for a
> blazing fast new computer. Maybe I'm trying to talk myself into it,
> instead of just poking around and learning stuff 'just in case' I pull
> the trigger. As Vanguard suggested, it might be wise to wait till
> Win12, when they really get serious about strangling my Win10.
> 
> Also, now that Win10 is on there I hardly boot it except to perform
> updates. Win7 browser is working fine so far.

At this point, W12 will use an NPU.

The keyboard will have a CoPilot button on it.

Perhaps you might talk to your computer (like
it was Alexa, "turn on this or that").

You can wait for Intel to get its shit together,
and maybe a more recent CPU will have a second-gen
NPU inside it. As well as a small GPU of course.
The NPU Intel is currently shipping seems to be
a smallish multiply-accumulate unit (perhaps
capable of matrix multiplication, which has been
used for neural networks). There's likely a bit more
glue needed in the thing, to catch up with AMD.

You can think of the launch objective to be
"any AI command a smartphone can support,
 we want to support that on a desktop".

That would include, making modifications to a
picture in Paint. "remove Tom from my family photo"
That sort of thing. The NPU could help with photo
manipulation.

As near as I can tell, these things don't have
tight coupling, so the NPU can live in the CPU or not
(but just because Intel and AMD are having a battle
with NVidia, and they will try and remove the
low end part of the market from the grasp of NVidia).

               TPM
                |
         GPU---CPU---NPU   [do not have to be inside the same package]

         Keyboard-with-CoPilot-Button [dream on, twits]

Because there is a rent seeking behavior implied, and
these companies will be showing Bezos how to run Alexa,
the CoPilot button is a form of "daily advertising".
They could not rely on Acer printing "now with CoPilot"
on that little plate that goes on the corner of
the laptop. Having a CoPilot key will serve that function.

They would call the button "the Bing button", but the
marketing men told them "No".

Longer queries you make, will be sent to the Microsoft
datacenter, and might take ten seconds to service. The
queries might live in a device with 1TB of memory, whereas
the NPU activity on your own machine, is estimated to
need 8GB of memory. Which is why W12 has a 16GB minimum
memory requirement. When it really only "needs" about
2.6GB . Deallocating the NPU system memory, means you
can't turn the lights on and off in the room,
using your W12 computer.

To run a model which is similar to the 1TB thing,
I've been looking at various shoot-from-the-hip efforts,
and someone thinks that 256GB might do it for a fuller
local execution model. But that's really just echoing
that DDR5 recently got to the point of supporting
256GB on four modules, and that is the
"striking distance value for a desktop".

        NPU                  ???            ???
         |                    |              |
        8GB                 256GB           1TB+

        Every computer.    More capable     Datacenter (rental)
        Relatively lame    local model.     Queries.

       "remove Tom from   "Hallucinate      "write me some C code
        family photo"      a beer bong"      to create world peace"

This is the recently consumed content, as part of making projections.
The fear involved here is, if the CPU does not have an NPU, the
add-in NPU card might be too expensive for what it will be doing
(doing the "small" model).

   https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/xdna.html

   https://www.engadget.com/intel-unveils-core-ultra-its-first-chips-with-npus-for-ai-work-150021289.html

Their standalone card appears to be an FPGA, since it is on a
Xilinx web page! Yikes! Automatically, the card is over $1000 then.
(The largest FPGA always costs $1000. One FPGA on the card.)

https://www.xilinx.com/applications/data-center/v70.html

You can see this topic is "too unripe" for consumer planning.
You could already remove Tom from the family photo, using
your smartphone, and you would not need W12 at all then.

   Paul