Fast Technology reported on February 20 that AMD officially announced that the upcoming Windows update will add a new monitoring tab in the task manager, which can display the use of the built-in NPU AI engine of Ryzen 8040 series processors.
The Ryzen 7040 series, released by AMD in early 2023, adds a separate NPU AI engine to the x86 processor for the first time, offloading some of the AI inference tasks originally performed by the CPU or GPU, thereby improving operating efficiency and extending battery life.
At the end of 2023, AMD released an upgraded version of the Ryzen 8040 series, with a significant increase in AI performance by 60, and related notebooks have been released and launched one after another.
AMD has also been working with Microsoft to enable MCDM (Microsoft Compute Driver Model) on Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors.
This is a derivative of the WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) and is aimed at non-GPU and computing devices such as NPUs, so that they can take advantage of existing GPU device management functions, including scheduling, power management, memory management, and performance tuning using tools such as Task Manager.
MCDM serves as the basic layer to ensure the smooth execution of AI workloads on NPU devices.
As for whether the first Ryzen 7040 series can also monitor the NPU in Windows Task Manager, it is unknown for the time being.
Intel Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors also integrate the NPU AI engine, and it has been preemptively displayed in the Windows Task Manager under the name "Intel AI Boost", which can display NPU utilization, memory usage and other data in real time.