this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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A cheap NPU could have some uses. If you have a background process that runs continuously, offloading the work to a low-cost NPU can save you both power and processing. Camera authorization, if you get up, it locks; if you sit down, it unlocks. No reason to burn a core or GPU for that. Security/Nanny cameras recognition. Driving systems monitoring a driver losing consciousness and pulling over. We can accomplish this all now with CPUs/GPUs, but purpose-built systems that don't drain other resources aren't a bad thing.
Of course, there's always the downside that they use that chip for recall. Or malware gets a hold of it for recall, ID theft, There's a whole lot of bad you can do with a low-cost NPU too :)