If I had to steelman Dell, they probably made a bet a while ago that the software side would have something for the NPU, and if so they wanted to have a device to cash in on it. The turnaround time for new hardware was probably on the order of years (I could be wrong about this).

It turned out to be an incorrect gamble but maybe it wasn’t a crazy one to make at the time.

There is also a chicken and egg problem of software being dependent on hardware, and hardware only being useful if there is software to take advantage of its features.

That said I haven’t used Windows in 10 years so I don’t have a horse in this race.

> There is also a chicken and egg problem of software being dependent on hardware, and hardware only being useful if there is software to take advantage of its features.

In the 90s, as a developer you couldn't depend on that a user's computer had a 3D accelerator (or 3D graphics) card. So 3D video games used multiple renderers (software rendering, hardware-accelerated rendering (sometimes with different backends like Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D)).

Couldn't you simply write some "killer application" for local AI that everybody "wants", but which might be slow (even using a highly optimized CPU or GPU backend) if you don't have an NPU. Since it is a "killer application", very many people will still want to run it, even if the experience is slow.

Then as a hardware vendor, you can make the big "show-off" how much better the experience is with an NPU (AI PC) - and people will immediately want one.

Exactly the same story as for 3D accelerators and 3D graphics card where Quake and Quake II were such killer applications.

They are still including the NPU though, they just realised that consumers aren't making laptop purchases based on having "AI" or being branded with Copilot.

The NPU will just become a mundane internal component that isn't marketed.