The last frontier in the world of processing inside modern PC cases are without a doubt the NPU (Neural Processing Unit)integrated chips that carry out Artificial Intelligence activities effectively thanks to their specific architecture and which allow to reduce the work on the CPU and GPU, all the latest generation processors integrate one inside.
If you have seen the stand of PowerColor at Computex 2024 then you will surely have noticed the presence of a particular element, let’s talk about Edge AI technologycapable of improving the energy efficiency of GPUs by leveraging the capabilities of neural processing units (NPUs).
In detail, the company connected an external Kneron NPU to an unspecified Radeon video card, obtaining an important result, namely a reduction in consumption from 263W to 205W with Cyberpunk 2077 and 338W to 262W with Final Fantasy XV.
Just the beginning
Edge AI promises to improve GPU performance, the test version showed a 10% drop in frame rate, this does not change the fact that since it is the Alpha version on a prototype bench, there is no reason to doubt that in the future it will not this may actually be the case, it can only be improved, also because we are faced with a clear increase in efficiency, the decrease in consumption is in fact in the order of 22%
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In all this it must be considered that the NPU can easily take care of the upscaling processes, taking workloads away from the GPU which would therefore be free to freely process the graphics, the underlying principle of Microsoft Automatic SR.
At the moment PowerColor has no intention of equipping its custom solutions with NPUs, this would significantly increase the already quite high prices, but this does not mean that it is highly probable that it will unleash Edge AI from its cylinder at the right time, probably when all PCs will be equipped with SoC with integrated NPU.
