npu-monitor: a system tray that knows what hardware each box actually has

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every multi-host monitoring tool I tried assumed homogeneous hardware: one GPU, maybe two, same on every machine. My LAN doesn’t work like that — one box has an AMD APU iGPU plus a Ryzen AI NPU, another has an AMD R9700 and an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti. So npu-monitor treats the device list as dynamic: each host reports its own real silicon and the tray renders whatever arrives.

The numbers come from the actual kernel interfaces, not screen-scraping: ROCm sysfs (gpu_busy_percent) for AMD cards, nvidia-smi for CUDA, /proc/stat deltas for CPU, and a raw DRM_IOCTL_AMDXDNA_GET_INFO ioctl against /dev/accel/accel0 — using the real 168-byte sensor struct from the kernel UAPI — for the NPU’s utilization columns.

slug-tts-stt: giving a mini-PC ears and a mouth, on two different chips

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A voice assistant needs two things from its hardware: it must hear you and it must answer you. On a single-box setup those workloads fight for the same chip — unless you deliberately split them. That’s the whole idea here: STT runs on the XDNA2 NPU (Whisper large-v3-turbo via FastFlowLM), TTS runs on the Radeon 840M iGPU (Qwen3-TTS 1.7B via qwentts.cpp/Vulkan). Both exposed as OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoints on your LAN. The reasoning brain lives elsewhere; this box is only ever the audio edge.

Amd on AiSlackin

npu-monitor: a system tray that knows what hardware each box actually has

slug-tts-stt: giving a mini-PC ears and a mouth, on two different chips