Intel NPU & Ryzen AI

[Abruraspingi]

With all this talk about how all PC's will soon become AI PC's I kept wondering how it would affect BOINC and Folding@home. So far there is little information on it and all I could really find was a forum thread on the now completed MLC@Home project
https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/forum_thread.php?id=4

I guess unless the programmers design code for these chips not much will change but like the Tensor cores in Nvidia chipsets I'm sure it will be just a matter of time.

It seems that the Intel NPU and Ryzen AI just save on power consumption at the moment. Here are a couple of articles to read
https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/i-tested-intels-meteor-lake-cpus-on-ai-workloads-and-amds-chips-sometimes-beat-them

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/core-ultra-client-computing-news-1.html

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/consumer/ryzen-ai.html

On another note using BOINC to crack passwords is an interesting use of the software
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1742287619301446

[ryzenmulti]

Thanks Ab. There are only so many ways to move bits through a processor and there is a crudload ($trillions$) invested in existing hardware and software development. I doubt a paradigm shift will happen fast unless it supports and/or rebuilds existing legacy code. Given $AI is $dollar driven, I doubt it will be a sunami of change. ... and unless they can stop robbing m/b real estate with slot hog GPU's, things need to get smaller before they get any bigger.

Besides, $AI is just a series of chained if/then condition statements. It requires trillions more logic gates to be truly neural, and unbounded output makes things like what Musk posted on twitter today (i.e it's a farce). Just like hyperthreading is/was. My 20c.

[Abruraspingi]

Completely agree with you on that one. There is a lot of money in AI and BOINC doesn't really produce the dollars. Still cheaper then time on a supet computer.

Google has its Alpha Fold AI for folding proteins bht that doesn't mean that power will be in consumer hands.

I remember why the PhysX chip first came out. It was a separate card that plugged into your M/B and took some of the heat off of the CPU. PhysX is kinda standard now but it's up to programmers to utilise it.

What I see as a boon for BOINC when it comes to NPU's is if the chip recognises a trend in the WU and skips a couple of calculations saving time and shortening the WU