The precise benefits of those tricksy new NPUs or neural processing units in the latest PC processors including Intel's Lunar Lake (shown above) and Arrow Lake chips are currently hard to pin down, despite the whole «AI PC» push.
But Intel reckons NPUs are here to stay and will be an equally important part of a trifecta that also includes CPUs and GPUs.
And that includes for gaming, people. Speaking at a round table event with assembled hacks at CES, including our own Jacob, Intel's Client Business Group general manager Jim Johnson explained how NPUs are here to stay.
His general gist was that NPUs will increasingly become an equal third pillar alongside CPUs and GPUs in the PC for everything from productivity and content creation to gaming and as-yet unimagined applications. «The NPU, the GPU and the CPU are here to stay,» Johnson said, explaining that each element is just going to get «better and better.» Moreover, Johnson reckons what currently feels like a clear distinction in functionality between CPU cores, graphics and neural processing units is going to become increasingly invisible to the end user.
To an extent, as Johnson sees it, all three will be key to enabling the AI-accelerated future of the PC, it's just the end user won't be aware of how the workload is being parcelled out, nor really need to worry about that. «You don't really know when you're in the GPU engine, when you're using the media engine, or using the EUs or when you're doing something from the CPU, Direct X or the NVIDIA pipeline,» Johnson said.