NPU Archives - LinuxLinks

Why A 50 TOPS NPU Is Almost Completely Useless

50 TOPS sounds impressive, but for most PC users, especially on Linux, today’s NPUs still have remarkably little practical use.

I test FastFlowLM on the BOSGAME VTA-439, running local LLMs on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470’s 55 TOPS XDNA 2 NPU.

I test the Beelink EQi Core 3 304’s 15-TOPS Intel NPU with OpenVINO and Llama 3.2 1B to see how useful modest NPUs really are.

Benchmarking the Minisforum M2’s Intel NPU with Llama 3.2 1B and OpenVINO, including speed, TTFT and AMD Ryzen AI comparisons.

amdtop is a terminal-based system monitor for computers powered by AMD hardware.

FastFlowLM puts the Minisforum N5 Pro’s 50 TOPS AMD XDNA 2 NPU to work under Linux for local LLMs and private AI server workloads.

Minisforum N5 Pro review with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, NVMe storage and 10GbE networking.

There are a few things to install to get the NPU ready for software. I set up the NPU with the CachyOS Linux distribution.

Linux has lots of software with upscaling functionality, some of which offers a wider range of features than the GIMP AI plugin.

Gaia is open source software designed for the quick setup and execution of generative AI applications on local PC hardware.

This blog documents my adventures with using the NPU present in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in Linux.