Intel And AMD Have Better NPUs Than Qualcomm On Paper, But Should You Really Care?

The first wave of Copilot+ PCs is finally hitting the market, and based on general opinions so far, it’s been pretty well received. Laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus have a lot of exciting things, including excellent performance and efficiency, and most notably a powerful NPU with 45TOPS of performance.

Shortly after these laptops were announced, though, Intel and AMD came out with their own announcements that their next-gen processors have even more powerful NPUs, with Intel promising 48TOPS and AMD going up to 50TOPS. That’s up to 10% more than what Qualcomm is offering, but when you think about it, does it even matter? Frankly, I’m not convinced there’s any reason to wait for Intel and AMD’s processors.

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Do all models have the same NPU?

One of the notable things about the Snapdragon X Series of processors is that all configurations of the Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite have the same 45TOPS of AI performance to offer. The CPU and GPU performance may vary, but the NPU is always the same.

When it comes to AMD or Intel’s new lineup of processors, though, we don’t know that this will be the case. AMD announced a pair of processors with a 50TOPS NPU, but both of those models are Ryzen 9 CPUs. Will the eventual Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, or Ryzen 3 models also have the same NPU? Still unclear. Similarly, Intel has announced 48TOPS for its Lunar Lake architecture, but that’s also the maximum you can expect across the entire range. We don’t know if every processor in the lineup will reach that performance.

By offering the same NPU in all its processors, Qualcomm has made it so that you can find Copilot+ PCs at different price points, and if AMD and Intel can’t do the same, it won’t be as impactful.

What are you even using the NPU for?

Without Recall, who cares?

When Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs, there were a few big features in tow, like new Windows Studio Effects, live captions with translation, or Cocreator in Paint. But obviously, the biggest one was Recall, a feature that can remember everything you do on your PC and then surface it by simply searching for what you’re doing. It was the most impressive feature of Copilot+, but also the most concerning due to the potential privacy threats it presents. And sure enough, it was quickly found that all this information was stored completely unencrypted on your PC, on top of it being on by default.

After a wave of criticism, Microsoft put the rollout of Recall on hold, which means none of the Copilot+ PCs on the market can actually use it yet. Even the Windows Insider Program offers no way to test this feature ahead of general availability, and some have even questioned whether it will ever be released at all.

With that in mind, what does an NPU even do on Windows? The features in Copilot+ are mostly party tricks, not something you’ll really use consistently. Live captions with translation sound useful, but most video streaming services already have captions in multiple languages. And the feature also isn’t the most reliable just yet, though in the future, I could see this being more useful. Still, as it stands, Copilot+ means almost nothing, so having a better NPU hardly matters.

And sure, there are third-party apps and tools that have AI features, but most of those today are still running on the CPU or GPU. For example, Adobe Lightroom has an AI noise reduction feature, but it only runs on the GPU, so having a capable NPU does nothing to help you there. A lot of noise reduction tools for microphones also run on the CPU or GPU. There are exceptions, of course, but right now, that difference in TOPS isn’t going to matter as much as you think.

Are they efficient?

There’s more to it than raw performance

Finally, we also have to talk about efficiency. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors aren’t just good because they’re faster, it’s also about efficiency. The Arm architecture has historically been way further ahead of x86 in terms of power consumption, delivering much better performance while using less power, and that’s what we’ve seen with the Snapdragon X models. In many cases, Intel or AMD processors can be faster, but that usually comes at the expense of using a lot more power, and even when Intel talks about better battery life, it means you’re sacrificing that performance to make it last longer.

So, when AMD and Intel promise 50TOPS or 48TOPS of performance, can you really expect that performance to be there if you’re using a laptop on battery power? Historically, both CPU and GPU performance drop dramatically when you use an Intel or AMD laptop unplugged from the wall, so who’s to say it will be any different with the NPU? And if performance doesn’t drop, how much power will that NPU be using and what will battery life be like compared to the Qualcomm laptops we have today?

While we obviously don’t have definitive answers to those questions yet since Intel and AMD’s new processors aren’t on the market, history tells us there’s probably a catch somewhere. No matter how hard companies try, x86 has never matched the efficiency of Arm.

No reason to wait

Buying a new laptop right now may seem like something of a risk when you have new hardware from Intel and AMD just around the corner, but the way I see it, if you care about Copilot+ PCs, you might be better off just buying one of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops available today. You already have plenty of options to choose from, and I can almost guarantee that Intel and AMD’s laptops won’t do anything that leverages the more powerful NPU.

In fact, the trade-offs in efficiency may end up making those worse options overall. Intel has promised to end the “myth” that x86 can’t be as efficient as Arm, but only time will tell if that actually happens.