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Chipmakers puting AI cores in your CPU and not letting you use them for absolutely anything is the biggest waste of silicon in the history of modern computing.
Those tensor cores are godsend for things like large-scale CAD simulations but the only SDKs/samples provided are hardwired to run pretrained models.
There's no way to access the matrix/tensor capabilities directly. And that goes for both AMD and Intel.
@sos To their credit, Apple is pretty good about releasing SDKs and doco for this.
@sbszine Tried looking it up but couldn't find anything! Where is it?
@sbszine There's nothing there, sorry.
@sos Blargh, I must have hallinucated it (on brand for AI stuff). I had a look about but aside from some folks reverse engineering the internal API it seems you can't do non ML stuff yet.
@sos I think Apple as well... It has NPUs in their silicon for many years now and despite there're ML APIs, and even high-level math framework (Accelerate) but they're always "high level" which means it’s „automatically" choosing what kind of hardware is best to use... which usually almost never use NPUs anyway (even for ML tasks) and just GPU & CPU 
Maybe this is ok though? Maybe indeed those NPUs are not as powerful as they seem and usually just worse for most cases?
@kkolakowski Waste of silicon.
@sos Not really, on Apple devices NPUs are responsible for fast FaceID, TouchID, various ML stuff - but mostly just internally.
@sos I'll have to look at it at home later but my first thought is that these are very specialised processors which only work with specific data types and must be fed in a specific way for optimum performance. So they don't really have a use case except in transformer based ML.
I would love to find a use case for this that could be applied to games, like running physics on it or something.
@dominikg Well, tensors are used to calculate tension, hence the name.
@sos do you mean gpu, not cpu, by chance? If you do mean cpu, do you have a link?
@demofox I do mean CPU and the problem is that there's nothing to link.
@nicklockwood @sos there is meaningful difference between cpu and gpu still 
@nicklockwood @demofox Yeah an NPU is disctinct from CPU and GPU