On the road with a 265HX, should AI workloads lean on the NPU or on its 20 threads?

  Light jobs belong on the NPU; on heavy ones neither engine is the answer. The 265HX's NPU, quoted near 33 TOPS, is built for low-power always-on duty, so captions and denoise should ride there, while the 20 threads with VNNI stay for short quantized bursts at the wall. A serious local-model run pushes 5.3GHz into mobile cooling and loses.

  It suits a travel laptop that keeps lightweight AI available at all times. Making it the permanent base for large local models is the wrong call. On battery trust the NPU, plugged in wake the threads, and keep that division straight or the machine lets you down on both ends.