I expect the next AMD board is probably a good ways off (and likely nothing official can be said in any direction about the topic for now), and so far I’m still very pleased with my 7840u, but I wanted to at least express interest in non-AI AMD boards in the future.
There’s been a lot of hype around AI in recent years, and I expect there’s some interesting potential for it, but at this stage I have no interest in any AI features or hardware in a thin and light laptop. I’ve seen many companies chase trends over the decades, and so I wanted to make sure to express my interest in a relatively high-end board that has either no AI features at all, or very minimal ones at most. I’ve been quite impressed by the 7840u so far, and primarily just want more of the same in conventional gaming and productivity workloads.
Of course, some people will probably be either indifferent, or highly interested in AI workloads, so there will likely be some amount of balancing needed. But as far as my computer goes, I’d much prefer hardware that’s heavily geared towards conventional gaming and productivity, rather than AI. Especially in a thin and light.
Anyway, that’s my nagging worries about the future appeased for the moment. I’ve been quite happy with the Framework boards I’ve purchased so far, and I hope to see the company continue to do well for many years to come.
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Most, if not all modern processors in the last year or so have a NPU and they will likely continue to have an NPU baked in. Even the Ryzen 7 7840U has an NPU, just that nothing is currently available to take advantage of it. The cost of the NPU is already baked into the overall cost of the processor and CPU companies will continue to invest resources into improving their capabilities. In addition, certain AI workloads can run or must run on the iGPU.
Now if you’re hoping that Framework doesn’t devote time/resources to develop software that relies on/utilizes AI, that’s a whole different story.
Just waiting for my computer/AI to ask me how I am, in the morning while taking my coffee…
You guys know that emacs has a built-in doctor that can “fake” conversation pretty well, despite the fact there is no AI involved at all 
But I do agree. AI chips is a big hype, like the cloud was a hype etc.
If I could reduce the power-consumption of my device without AI unit, the It would be good to have an alternative without it.
I think your perspective is OK – customer demand is customer demand.
It’s notable that the energy cost of inference on a pre-trained model (or a large amount of pre-trained model with local additional data) is tiny even compared to a CPU doing ordinary desktop computing. So if you don’t get a ‘non AI’ device and whether or not you disable it, the chip serving as NPU is not going to eat your battery or compromise the thinness or lightness of the device.
K3n.