Artificial intelligence has become a more than common term in many conversations, whereas a few years ago it was nothing more than a utopia that we had only seen in the movies. Most, if not almost all, of the artificial intelligences we use on a daily basis work remotely, that is to say on their developers’ servers, and not locally.
Working remotely means that processing times are much slower since we have to wait for our request to be accepted by the AI, process it when it has time and send the result back to us. When you rely heavily on AI, these processing times, in the long run, can be a huge waste of time. The solution to this problem comes from processors integrating an NPU.
Nail NPU it’s a Neural processing unit (translated into Spanish) and is responsible for executing Artificial Intelligence tasks locally on the computer, so there is no need to have a permanent Internet connection. The number of computers that include an NPU dedicated to Artificial intelligence It is growing every month and there is already a wide variety of models on the market.
The reason for implementing an NPU with the CPUs is focused on reduce GPU usage to perform this type of task, especially on laptops, since this AI processor consumes much less resources than any graphics card, dedicated or not, to the management of tasks related to Artificial Intelligence. Intel and AMD and just like Qualcomm with processors Snapdragon X Elite Yes Snapdragoninclude a dedicated NPU, but how do we know?
To check if a PC has an NPU to perform AI tasks locally, we have two ways to do it.
How to know if a processor supports AI
The easiest and fastest way, if we have not yet purchased the equipment, is to check the processor specifications. On each manufacturer’s website we can enter the processor model to access the specifications and check the AI capabilities of the NPU, provided that it includes them, since not all models do.
But, if we have already made the purchase and we are not entirely sure that our PC can perform tasks related to Artificial Intelligence locally and without depending on the graphics card, we just have to access the Task Manager of Windows. Through the Task Manager With Windows we can not only know if an application is consuming more resources than usual, but we can also access information related to the computer’s hardware, such as the processor, graphics card and if it has an NPU.
If the processor of the computer we are using includes a neural processing unit to perform tasks locally, this will be displayed just below the information related to the computer’s graphics card and responding to the name of the NPU. The level of use of the equipment is also indicated.
