I wanted a cheap, low-power, always-on person detector. Of course, I’m building this on a BrightSign XT5 player (more on that later). But since a friend said he was using a Beelink SER9 with a AMD Ryzen AI NPU (~50 TOPS) I thought I’d check it out. Can it actually run the detector? Short answer, as of today: no — and the reason is not the part you’d expect.
I have two 128 GB unified-memory machines on my desk. Day job gear, not mine. One is an ASUS Ascent GX10 — an NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell appliance half the size of a hardback book. The other is an HP ZBook Ultra G1a, a 14" mobile workstation running AMD’s Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 (“Strix Halo”). Both hold an 80B coding model entirely in memory. How do they compare for agentic coding?
One morning I opened my HP ZBook Ultra G1a and the trackpad was dead. Keyboard fine. Touchscreen fine. External mouse fine. Trackpad: nothing. Twelve hours earlier it had worked. I hadn’t changed anything. Welcome to bleeding-edge silicon on Linux.