Microsoft Gives Task Manager Another Task: Watching AI Workloads 53
Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was keen to point out the metrics that can be monitored. "As AI workloads become more common on Windows devices, visibility into NPU and GPU neural engine utilization can help you make better-informed decisions," the company said. "With the latest Task Manager improvements, you can monitor AI processing activity alongside CPU, memory, storage, and networking data from a familiar interface."
humble opinion (Score:3)
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That is because Wall Street is dominated by stupid people with a lot of money. They hear about AI this and AI that(promoted by NVIDIA), and all Wall Street cares about it AI. That makes CEOs and executives want to SAY that they are going to incorporate AI into everything, in the hopes it causes the stock prices to go up.
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While Wall Street IS dominated by stupid people with a lot of money, but so are Americans; yer basic Americans have been propping stock prices back up every time there is a dip. And WS cares about a lot more than AI, you are only following the Street from the 20,000 foot level. Get closer to ground level and you'll see just how complex is their business.
Lately, some parts of WS has been getting the jitters about how much of a matzo ball AI has hanging out there, specifically the hyper-scalers and the circul
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https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1?op=1 [businessinsider.com]
what the rich are exited about is more control over us. They are excited about replacing people, they are excited about the power to pull strings even more.
But their investment will kill economies all over the world when the bubble bursts. The USA is not in a good state with the massive debt, and the AI b
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It seems like every team in Microsoft is trying to attach AI to the part they work on whether it makes sense or not.
While that is true, it is also not what this is about.
They're expanding Task Manager to give you insight and monitoring capabilities for when AI is running. They're not injecting AI into Task Manager itself.
Re: humble opinion (Score:1)
Re: humble opinion (Score:2)
An NPU is a piece of hardware just like a GPU.
Re: humble opinion (Score:1)
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Y
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Task Manager does NOT show GPU memory usage though. You need to use Process Explorer to see what the task is that is using your GPU memory for example. I don't know why Microsoft hasn't just incorporated all those Sysinternals tools into the OS at this point, or at least put them on the list of optional features you can enable.
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Probably some combination of "they don't want to clutter the UI with options and data most users don't care about" and "they don't want you to see the amount of system resources consumed by telemetry, advertising, 'on-device AI,' and other shit you didn't ask for."
That said, I don't really see this particular change as "pushing AI" on anyone -- just an evolution in the types of hardware and workloads commonly encountered, with a corresponding evolution in tooling.
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But 100% yes, I agree. I love Sysinternals.
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Because it was invented just a few years ago.
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You can certainly go deeper into etw trace hell; but Task Manager knows how much CPU time you are eating, your memory consumption metrics, your network traffic, and has a (currently less granular) look at your consumption of GPU time. It also having a view of consumed NPU time seems totally analogous for a new flavor of coprocessor. Only one that might involve
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But task manager is for OS performance and has worked well for os performance for many years. AI is an application. So now they are adapting taskmgr to monitor application internals. Why now? Just because of AI.
Task Manager is for application performance. It tells you what resources a given task/PID/application is using. It tells you what memory usage is, CPU usage is, GPU usage is, per application. Extending this to NPU hardware is very much the purview of Task Manager.
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And no, Task Manager is not for OS performance, that's Performance Monitor (perfmon.msc).
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But task manager is for OS performance and has worked well for os performance for many years. AI is an application. So now they are adapting taskmgr to monitor application internals. Why now? Just because of AI.
They're adding direct tracking for the performance of hardware utilized by AI. The only reason they're labelling it "AI monitoring" is because some investor class droolers will start fapsturbating as they throw their wallets into the AI circlejerk. It's actually hardware monitoring, and can be useful for those who use Windows for other GPU/NPU intensive tasks.
Apps have always been tracked by task manager. It's the default view. AI as an operational program would show up in that list as a process, but may no
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They're not injecting AI into Task Manager itself.
Yet. Give it time.
I'm only half joking. I can see them at least putting an AI wrapper on Task Manager to "interpret" its output and offer "helpful suggestions" - including the suggestion to purchase hardware and subscription upgrades.
Re: humble opinion (Score:2)
It makes sense in this case.
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Microsoft differentiated itself from slower-moving rivals by being willing to embrace (etc.) the hot new thing. Now Windows is on most desktops and we mostly use office, despite both being shit. (Yesterday, Windows 11 forgot how to pop up right-click menus from the taskbar and office forgot how to open new windows, while I actually had RAM free... I love rebooting!)
As such it makes sense to AI all the things since that's what stupid people have latched onto now, and there's no shortage of those.
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The NVidia settings panel has shown utilization and power consumption for years and I use it often on Linux just to see if an inference run is saturating the card so I can know if my batch size is correct.
It's about time the entire set of processors on your computer is included in such a basic utility.
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The existing iteration of Task Manager is adequate for me, since I know there's only one app eating all my GPU cookies. I'm not trying to run llama.cpp, ComfyUI, and a video encoder all at the same time (or even two at once, although I might run a video encoder without evicting Gemma first—I just won't ask Gemma to do anything) because I already know they'll just trip all over each other, so it's enough just to know how close I'm coming to the limits of VRAM, and how much of a performance hit I'm suff
This is actually good, though (Score:2)
I hate AI as much as the next person that has been in IT for 30 years, but they're adding a reasonable feature to task manager based on what hardware is currently being thrown at computers.
However, this being The New Microsoft I'm surprised it's not a subscription.
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> I hate AI as much as the next person that has been in IT for 30 years
As someone who's been in IT for 30 years, I think it's great. But I'm also aware that it means I may have to go looking for another line of work in a year or two.
I'm also also aware that if the AI companies start charging the actual cost of their products instead of massively subsidizing it then replacing me doesn't look like such a great deal.
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When your new computer has CPU, GPU and NPU, you probably want a way not only to see CPU and GPU usage, but also NPU usage. It's not about Microsoft adding an AI application, but about monitoring a part of your hardware.
What is the purpose of any of this? (Score:1)
Can someone explain to me what problems in your life you are addressing or solving with AI?
At this point AI sounds like /dev/rnd piped to speakers 24/7.
Re: What is the purpose of any of this? (Score:2)
I have a chronic disease that is affecting my ability to work. I am going to use AI to analyze my insurance documents and employee handbook to come up with the best course of action for me going part time. Which is not as much of a salary problem with me but an insurance problem.
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Claude is good enough to write a lot of software now. I'll give you an example from just yesterday. I wanted to export a Kicad footprint to a dxf file but the capability didn't exist. Claude gave me a python script in seconds. It required one revision and that was to be able to set the unit of measurement. Another example is an Arduino library for a type of obsolete numeric display. Clade gave me working code in a minute. I'm not good at programming so having what amounts to a magic code genie is mind boggl
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"The DoD became the Department Of War and lost their very first war." Yes, but they lost it in the name of Jesus. Let us all now bow our heads in thanks that we have Christian nation able to blow up boats in the Caribbean without even knowing what is in them. It turns out that if you do not love your fellow man, then it is okay to kill them. It is all in the New Golden Bible brought you by el Bunko for $49.99 a pop, $99.99 if you get the version with the Golden Embossed Lettering.
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I am laughing my ass off even as I write this - which fact is its own kind of sadness, as well as a condemnation of what the world has come to. So, thanks - I guess?
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And not one word of that is parody. It's reality.
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No, LLMs are pretty good these days, at least in software development. Yesterday I was helping on a Python project and I don't know Python that well; I was able to use Claude to make the changes I needed to make, sanity-check its changes and get the work done much faster than I would have by myself.
Also I was on Windows last week and didn't have a Markdown viewer installed so I got my local Deepseek LLM to write one for me in .Net, which I also don't know very well. Wouldn't ship it to customers but it work
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There are plenty of fine-tuned open models on Hugging Face. Many of those fine tunes are *specifically* geared for creative writing, and/or role playing. If you need deeper intellect, you can always take the Corporatespeak output of a large commercial model and ask your local model to make it sound less robotic while retaining the factual accuracy. The smaller models just generally take it for granted that anything they're told that falls outside their expertise must be true, and will happily rehash all the
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It's similarly helpful with any cryptic error message. LLMs, even small ones, are surprisingly good at understanding their own inner workings. Even Gemma 4 26B-A4B (which is not the smartest) has helped me a whole lot. Even if it's only right half the time (and it's somewhat better than that), it doesn't take very long to validate its ideas—and when it's right, you win.
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Being able to generate a usable analysis of a 500k+ line log file
It's propaganda (Score:2)
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Catch up! (Score:3)
Ha ha, Linux already has..
# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'
.. d'oh! Never mind.
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'nvidia-smi' tells you pretty much everything except the percentage of the GPU usage per app. Doesn't have the pretty graphs, but most people who care about those things probably have their own Grafana setup for it.
Re: Catch up! (Score:2)
There is also nvtop
Could explain battery drain (Score:1)
But is Microsoft Honest About Their Usage? (Score:2)
My Windows 10 PC has a leak of some kind (Score:1)
but I can't track it down. Memory usage and disk/SSD look fine. I suspect either GPU or some weird OS stack gets full or confused. Windows 10 has a secret bladder that needs a diaper.
Maybe it should work with processes first? (Score:2)
Lately I've encountered a bunch of Windows 11 machines were the task manager shows you an empty list. Just one of the many places they've managed to break parts of their OS that used to work just fine.
What Windows 11 applications use the NPU? (Score:2)
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There is not much use yet. I think there are engines that can run small LLMs on the NPU and you can probably do image recognition quite fast. Overall it waits for more adoption as most LLM developers use GPUs as NPU is for efficiency and not for rapid development, but once more parts become integrated into the OS you will have functions like WritingTools use it, so you don't have to hear your cpu/gpu fan when letting your editor rephrase something.
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I 'spose if you run local AI, it might matter... but I would think if you're running local AI, you're probably not running it on a little laptop.
YES! (Score:2)
I waited a LONG time for Microsoft to screw up Notepad but they did it. For some reason, they seemed very resistant to screw up the task manager but I see now that they are finally moving in the right direction! The last step is for them to add a "let Co-pilot manage my processes" button for the enshitification to be complete! I believe in Microsoft's ability to intentionally harm their users. Don't disappoint me MS!