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> Some AMD laptops haven't even yet enabled the NPU in firmware
This is entirely the fault of the OEMs though, not AMD. It is activated on mine for example. But pretty much unusable under Linux at the moment (unless you're willing to run a custom kernel for it[0].)
0. https://github.com/amd/xdna-driver
In the benchmark you have linked, you clearly see that the performance of the CPU only implementation and the NPU implementation are identical.
https://github.com/amd/RyzenAI-SW/blob/main/example/transfor...
What this should tell you is that "15 TOPs" is an irrelevant number in this benchmark. There are exactly two FLOPs per parameter. Loading the parameters takes more time than processing them.
There are people with less than 8GB of VRAM and they can't load these models into their GPU and end up with the exact same performance as on CPU. The 12tflops of the 3060 Ti 8GB are "no good" for LLMs, because the bottleneck for token generation is memory bandwidth.
My Ryzen 2700 gets 7 tokens per second at 50 GFLOPs. What does this tell you? The NPU can saturate the memory bandwidth of the system.
Now here is the gotcha: Have you tried inputting very large prompts? Because that is where the speedup is going to be extremely noticeable. Instead of waiting minutes on a 2000 token prompt, it will be just as fast as on GPUs, because the initial prompt processing is compute bound.
Also, before calling something subpar, you're going to have to tell me how you are going to put larger models like Goliath 70b or 120b models on your GPU.