Hardware1 hOctober 5, 2026, 02:00

NPU thermal throttling in Copilot+ laptops: 45 TOPS only in short bursts

A deep-dive shows the advertised 45 TOPS of NPUs in Copilot+ laptops holds only under short bursts: during continuous local inference the chip exceeds 85 °C and generation drops from 25 to 12 tokens per second. The heat also accelerates battery wear and raises LPDDR5X memory latency.

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NPU thermal throttling in Copilot+ laptops: 45 TOPS only in short bursts

Advertised 45 TOPS NPU performance lasts only the first minutes
Sustained inference drops speed from 25 to 12 tokens per second
Chip temperature exceeds 85 °C, triggering thermal throttling
Liquid metal repaste lowers temperatures by only 2 °C

#Copilot+#NPU#LPDDR5X

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