7840U AI processor on Windows

Framework Laptop 13
1

Hi all. I am interested to explore using the AI processor in the AMD 7840u. I see the IPU is detected and installed in Device Manager (I am using Windows).

AFAIK, the only “out of the box” usage of an IPU in Windows is Windows Studio Effects. But I don’t see any advanced settings in the Camera app.

This post Intel is sneaky - #2 by Kieran_Levin seems to indicate that the camera also needs to be connected using the MIPI interface, and that is not the case in the Framework 13. Is this also true for the AMD version?

2

Any thoughts on this, or how we can use the NPU in any useful way on Windows?

3

doesnt amd have like some SDKs or something for exactly this, currently still limited to the windows platform? havent followed through all this

p.s. just checked, and the whole sdk and requirements, are still for win11 only:

https://www.amd.com/en/developer/resources/ryzen-ai-software.html
Installation Instructions — Ryzen AI Software 1.1 documentation

4

I believe the camera interface is irrelevant.
It’s just that AMD are quite behind and don’t really have anything to show on the NPU.
I downloaded and successfully ran the example in their sdk - the NPU is working, which is good as it’s not guaranteed, it depends on vendor enablement, not just SKU. However, things are at an extreme alpha/beta stage, don’t expect to see anything real for it any time soon.

5

Annoyingly for as much as the “AI PC” seems to be a marketing term these days, these NPUs are exceedingly useless.
Windows theoretically has “Studio Effects”, but ultimately that’s for very select OEMs and Surface devices it seems (besides being absolutely useless bad software).

TL;DR Currently, there really just isn’t much you can do.

My hope is that DirectML or some other unified API lets developers actually develop.

6

Indeed. In the Meteor Lake announcement, Intel promoted a number of partners (Zoom etc.) with whom they are working to “enable” their AI NPU. It’s unclear to me if (a) the partners are building on DirectML, and (b) whether AMD have a DirectML driver for their 7xxx and 8xxx series NPU

1 Like