NPU / TOPS

An NPU (Neural Processing Unit) is a dedicated AI accelerator alongside the CPU and GPU, and TOPS (trillion operations per second) is the unit used to rate it. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 boxes carry a 50-TOPS XDNA 2 NPU; NVIDIA's GB10 and Apple's Neural Engine take different approaches to the same idea. TOPS measures low-precision throughput for on-device AI tasks — background features, vision, small models — not the memory-bound work of large LLM generation, which still leans on GPU bandwidth. So a high TOPS number doesn't translate into faster 70B tokens/sec.

Don't shop for local LLM performance by TOPS — it rates the NPU, not the memory bandwidth that actually caps big-model speed. TOPS matters for Copilot+ style on-device features; bandwidth matters for running large models.