Best use cases for an NPU in your Windows 11 laptop

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Most of the Windows laptops launched in 2024 feature a dedicated NPU or Neural Processing Unit. Microsoft especially has been going hammer and tongs emphasising the importance of an NPU in a Windows PC, which will be useful for offloading AI workloads from the CPU and GPU. If you've bought a new Windows laptop this year with an Intel Core Ultra processor, Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, or an AMD 7040 series and later processor, your laptop already has an NPU in it. But, what are you supposed to do with it?

We're still in the very nascent stages of running on-device AI computing on Windows as there simply aren't enough apps that use an NPU. All the big CPU makers and Microsoft are essentially selling you a vision at the moment, on how future Windows PCs could benefit from having dedicated hardware for AI. If you're planning on using your laptop for training AI models, then the GPU is still going to be the best hardware for the job. AI inferencing using pre-trained models on the other hand is something where an NPU could prove to be more power-efficient and quicker.

If you're looking to put that NPU in your Windows laptop to good use, here are some of the apps that currently take advantage of it and can do certain AI tasks on-device.

Also read: How to choose the right AMD CPU for your next laptop

You don't need to have a Copilot+ PC to enjoy this Windows 11 feature. For instance, the Dell XPS 14 9440 running an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor also supports Studio Effects. The quickest way to access this feature is via the control panel pop-up menu for Wi-Fi, etc, in Windows 11. If your laptop has an NPU, you should see the “Studio effects” toggle next to the Bluetooth button. You can enable background blur, eye contact, or automatic framing for any of the apps that use the camera. With any of these features enabled, you'll notice a spike in NPU usage in Task Manager, which shows that it is in fact using the NPU for processing these effects in real-time. The difference