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Windows Central
Windows Central
Technology
Cale Hunt

This mini PC is the first I've seen with a discrete NPU for dedicated AI tasks. There's just one problem.

Lenovo Intel Corporation ThinkCentre UL AMD Kinara Nvidia
The Kinara Ara-2 NPU in the ThinkCentre neo Ultra.

This week, I've been busy putting Lenovo's ThinkCentre neo Ultra mini PC to the test. It's a sleek, powerful, and compact desktop that I'll have a full review to check out in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I've run into a snag.

Alongside its desktop-class Intel processor (CPU) and NVIDIA graphics card (GPU), the ThinkCentre neo Ultra has a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Unlike the AI PCs I've tested in the past — primarily in laptop form — the NPU is not a part of the System-on-Chip (SoC).

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