The precise benefits of those tricksy new NPUs or neural processing units in the latest PC processors including Intel's Lunar Lake (shown above) and Arrow Lake chips are currently hard to pin down, despite the whole "AI PC" push. But Intel reckons NPUs are here to stay and will be an equally important part of a trifecta that also includes CPUs and GPUs. And that includes for gaming, people.
Speaking at a round table event with assembled hacks at CES, including our own Jacob, Intel's Client Business Group general manager Jim Johnson explained how NPUs are here to stay. His general gist was that NPUs will increasingly become an equal third pillar alongside CPUs and GPUs in the PC for everything from productivity and content creation to gaming and as-yet unimagined applications.
"The NPU, the GPU and the CPU are here to stay," Johnson said, explaining that each element is just going to get "better and better." Moreover, Johnson reckons what currently feels like a clear distinction in functionality between CPU cores, graphics and neural processing units is going to become increasingly invisible to the end user.
To an extent, as Johnson sees it, all three will be key to enabling the AI-accelerated future of the PC, it's just the end user won't be aware of how the workload is being parcelled out, nor really need to worry about that.
"You don't really know when you're in the GPU engine, when you're using the media engine, or using the EUs or when you're doing something from the CPU, Direct X or the NVIDIA pipeline," Johnson said.
As for the specifics of how NPUs will impact gaming, Johnson's take seems to be that the impact of AI and the NPU will be so broad, that it will impact everyone almost by definition.
"A gamer is not only a gamer, they're also a streamer, and they're also a video conferencer, and so I absolutely believe AI features in the NP will impact gamers," he explained.
Moreover, the impact of AI will be utterly profound in the way it speeds almost everything up and leads to new and as-yet unimagined applications. "The magic is the applications get better faster, do something new you haven't done before," Johnson said.
He also thinks NPUs will be important for running background AI tasks efficiently, while GPUs will do the heavy lifting when up-front AI muscle is required. "If you want background, hyper background, highly capable, low power [AI], that's the NPU. But if you want to do [generative] AI fast and you want to [generate] a beautiful picture, that's the GPU," he said.
Now, one could argue Johnson isn't saying very much here, that he's dealing in the kind of empty generalizations regarding the benefits of AI that have rather plagued PC marketing of late. Can't someone just tell us exactly how it's going to benefit gaming?
But perhaps the template here, somewhat ironically, is the GPU. There was a time when evangelists from a certain green-tinged graphics company bigged up the idea of GPUs as the parallel-processing solution to all our computing problems and it all seemed a bit nebulous and hypothetical. Does every PC really need a powerful GPU, even PCs that nobody is going to use for gaming?
Fast forward a decade or three and a half-decent GPU is de rigueur even for a thin-and-light laptop with absolutely no gaming pretensions. Heck, the likes of Apple are making mainstream chips for distinctly non-gaming-orientated MacBooks with much larger GPUs than CPUs. Funnily enough, Apple is also fitting out its chips with ever-larger NPUs.
In other words, the mere fact that at this early stage of the gestation of the NPU, it's a little tricky to pin down easily definable benefits of and applications for NPUs doesn't mean that they're not on the way to become at least as important at CPU cores and GPUs. But we will probably have to wait a little bit longer to see exactly how it all pans out.
In the meantime, GPUs will remain the most important chip for gaming for the foreseeable. So, why not check out Nvidia's hot new RTX 50 desktop GPUs, and their companions headed for laptops later this year, all just announced at CES.
