NPU Support

[jullanggit]

Hey, I was just wondering if NPU (for example on newer intel cpu's) support is planned / what the thoughts of the team are about this.
Having support for NPU's and TPU's seems to strongly align with burns stated mission, but I would imagine it would be quite a lot of work.

[mertalev]

Not part of the Burn team, but while I think this is very valuable to support, it's also quite difficult to do in a generic way given the NPU world is so fragmented. There is no Vulkan or WebGPU equivalent for them; they often require exported models per chip using the vendor's proprietary tooling and inference engine. I'm sure it can be done for specific common targets like Intel NPUs if they have the bandwidth for it, but I wouldn't expect supporting NPUs as a broad class like Wgpu.

[jullanggit]

Okay, thanks!

[nathanielsimard]

Yeah, NPUs are often not programmable chips, you can't write custom kernels for them, which limits a lot of what we can do.