Discrete GPUs Still Beat New NPU Chips for Local AI Tasks, But Promising Future as Capabilities Grow
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Local AI capabilities in new laptops with NPUs are still very limited and often just parlor tricks, though a few have practical use cases like better video calls.
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Lenovo has an experimental "AI Now" suite that looks promising for summarizing files and generating reports, but it's not using the NPU yet.
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Nvidia GPUs already deliver practical AI abilities like upscaling video and images locally. New demos like RTX Video HDR and Chat with RTX show more potential.
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Chat with RTX runs locally on files to quickly answer questions, unlike cloud AI services. You can also point it at YouTube videos to get fast summarizes.
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For real AI power today, discrete Nvidia GPUs are still far ahead of new NPU chips. But NPUs show long-term promise if momentum continues.