BOINC
Detect available NPU
Modern SoCs include not only CPU and GPU, but also a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit): https://opencv.org/blog/2022/11/29/working-with-neural-processing-units-npus-using-opencv/#:~:text=NPU%2C%20short%20for%20neural%20processing,it%20is%20pretty%20power%20efficient. Since AI is quite a hot topic now, and BOINC is something that could be useful for it (reference: #5358), it would be nice to be able to identify available NPU and report it to the Project. This should be done for:
- Android
- Linux
- MacOS (technically, M* chips have support of it, and we don't need a dedicated identification of the NPU there since these chips are more or less standard)
- Windows (~not sure this is applicable to the x86/x64 architecture~ should be applicable to x86/x64 as well according to this blog post: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/05/23/bringing-the-power-of-ai-to-windows-11-unlocking-a-new-era-of-productivity-for-customers-and-developers-with-windows-copilot-and-dev-home/ but still need additional research, and might be important for Windows on ARM64 as well)
Contact point: @AenBleidd
NPUs fit into BOINC's 'coprocessor' framework. What are the APIs by which NPUs can be accessed?
Windows has since the AMD CPUs have https://www.amd.com/en/products/ryzen-ai & Intel in the 14th Gen consumer products https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/2023-intel-innovation-day-1-all-news.html#gs.777uaz
https://ryzenai.docs.amd.com/en/latest/inst.html
Looking forward for BOINC to include detection for DPUs, IPUs, NPUs, QPUs, TPUs & VPUs into recognized computational devices. 👍
