NPU almost always active after bootup. Copilot+ pc with Qualcom processor

Question

Microsoft Copilot + PC. Task manager shows NPU cycling between 0 and 80% usage on a 50% square wave cycle after bootup with no applications running. CPU usage 1%, memory usage 1%.

Cannot find any reason for the NPU to be running so much. Any thoughts?

Web searches find problems of zero NPU.

Answer 1

I had exactly the same symptoms: (Snapdragon) NPU running close to 100% most of the time. In my case the cause was the indexing of the hard drive.

To check if indexing is running, go to Settings > Privacy & security > Search. The Indexing Status will tell you if it is processing, and on the right-hand side how many files have been indexed and how many are still to go. Annoyingly, you can’t see what folders & files are indexed and which are still in the queue.

Scroll down and choose “Advanced indexing options” and click “Pause” on the next window. If indexing was the issue the NPU load should drop.

Indexing is not quick: on my laptop it took a couple of months, but I did copy over 50GB of files from my previous laptop. You can speed it up by limiting what gets indexed, for example by excluding certain folders. Computer source code seems to be particularly awkward to index.

Once the disk is indexed, though, searching for a specific term through all files is super-fast.