Windows Task Manager will make room for AMD’s AI computing units

Alongside the Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU units, AMD is increasingly highlighting its XDNA NPU units, as in the processors Ryzen 8040.

For almost a year, AMD has integrated into some of its processors a specific unit dedicated to artificial intelligence, the NPU or neural processing unit.

A unit operated jointly with the CPUs and GPUs of the brand’s processors and of course supported by Windows in particular, but not directly visible within the system. Well, that was before.

NPU XNDA kesako?

An NPU or neural processing unit is, as its name indicates to the most English-speaking among us, a computing unit designed to accelerate an artificial neural network.

Perhaps in a slightly clearer way – but also more schematically – it is therefore a chip whose objective is to optimize all operations useful for artificial intelligence. AMD does not hide it by presenting the XDNA architecture of its NPUs.

“ As neural networks become larger and more complex, the demand for higher computing density with lower power continues to grow. […] AMD XDNA NPU architecture meets this imperative “.

Present in particular on the Ryzen 8040 range CPUs, the NPU just has to make its way to be more officially visible under Windows.

Integration with task manager

And this is precisely the work that AMD is currently carrying out – in conjunction with Microsoft of course – as Joel Hruska, marketing manager at AMD, explains to us in a text published by VideoCardz.

All the work of the two companies is to ensure that AMD’s NPUs are perceived as full-fledged units by the Windows task manager. In fact, it will then be possible to see their utilization rate as can be done with CPUs and GPUs.

In detail, AMD and Microsoft are working “ so that the MCDM (Microsoft Compute Driver Model) infrastructure of Ryzen 8040 processors is enabled for NPUs. MCDM is derived from WDDM, the Windows display driver model. It targets non-GPU computing units like the NPU “.

Recall that GPUs were only integrated into Windows Task Manager in 2017, years after their emergence as the PC’s major computing unit. The NPU could therefore arrive much faster, even if it remains to be explained why AMD is only talking about the Ryzen 8040 while NPUs are present on the 7040 and the 8000G.

Source : AMD, VideoCardz