Re: Installing on Radxa Rock Pi 4B using SD-card-images
On 6/11/23 15:22, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
For future readers of the list: I had to search for the meaning of an
NPU and found this reference helpful -
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ai-101-gpu-vs-tpu-vs-npu/ - no further
opinions as to the company behind it. NPU - Neural Processing Unit -
chip designed for AI use.
NPU in this context is not actually the Big G. The leader on small
system NPU is actually Nvidia and their Jetson product et al. In my case
Rockchip has added a processor they style an NPU to their newer SOC
products. What that boils down to is one or more units that can perform
very fast vector arithmetic operations at various precisions. These can
be used to process data in neural networks as well as conventional
signal/image processing.
In my case I have a Rockchip RK3588 that can do 6 TOPS (Tera operations
per second) using three independent NPU cores. You can use these to do
neural network work or anything else that vector arithmetic is helpful
with such as image processing or signal processing.
These NPU units will become more and more common and their use will be
adapted by many current applications to speed operations for signal and
image processing. However, at this stage, though they are also be able
to do Neural Network processing, the really intense NN applications such
as Large Language Models (e.g. GPT) are probably out of useful reach.
That stuff is done in the cloud with dedicated NN processors (which may
be Nvidia based?)
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