Ask Paul: August 16 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has emerged as a blockbuster installment of this series, so I recommend settling in for a long read and an early start to the weekend.
Missing the point
jeroendegrebber asks:

When it comes to laptops, I care about battery life, but not about AI and having an NPU. So ARM CPU: yay! , NPU: meh (nay). Do you think there will be premium laptops without an NPU? Would there be a point? Or am I missing something entirely on this?

I write this jokingly, but ... Yes, you are missing the point entirely. :) But please don't take that the wrong way. Everyone is missing the point, and it's because Microsoft and its hardware partners are marketing this incorrectly, and selfishly, by focusing exclusively on on-device AI workloads that it hopes will lighten the bandwidth hitting its incredibly expensive cloud-based AI servers. This is a company that just spent $19 billion in a single quarter building out that infrastructure, and over $10 billion in each of the previous three quarters, and it promises similar spending--sorry, investments--in each of the next four quarters too. So, yes, Microsoft can afford this, but it's also unsustainable. At some point, AI needs to pay for itself. In the meantime, we get Copilot+ PCs.

So. To level set this, think about it this way. Asking whether there will be processors without NPUs in the future is like asking whether you can buy a processor without an integrated floating-point math coprocessor (as we could briefly when there were 386SX/486SX chips in addition to 386DX/486DX chips) or without multimedia (SSE) extensions or whatever. And the answer is no, because costs go down, the technology gets better, and these things are just part of the base package. The thing is, in 1993 or whatever, you as a consumer might have thought, hey, I don't need floating-point speed, I use Word, not Excel, or whatever. And that's sort of the argument today: These NPU use cases are either highly targeted/vertical or just not of use to you at this point in time.

But that's not what the NPU is for. I mean, it is. But we're getting caught up in too many of these uninteresting and very specific features in certain apps and don't see the big picture. Part of this story about processor advances over the years also includes integrating ever more powerful GPUs into the silicon, too. And as I wrote recently in A Few Thoughts on Portable PC Gaming (Premium), we're on the cusp of an exciting new era in which even basic PC processors are good enough to play AAA games at decent resolutions and graphics quality. What's interesting is that this already happened on mobile (more on that below, in a different answer, and then coming soon in a separate article), and that as these things move forward in tandem, the PC is catching up in some areas (integrated GPU, NPU), just as mobile had done over the previous decade.

Remember when Microsoft first started talking about hardware accelerated graphics in Longhorn and how exci...