Microsoft Gives Task Manager Another Task: Watching AI Workloads
- Reference: 0185076752
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/08/21/0136250/microsoft-gives-task-manager-another-task-watching-ai-workloads
- Source link:
> 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."
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/task-manager-features-for-visibility-into-ai-workloads/4545150
[2] https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/20/microsoft-gives-task-manager-another-task-watching-ai-workloads/5290448
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
Re: (Score:3)
"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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It's made my job easier. Ever have to parse a log file for a piece of software you aren't familiar with?
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Being able to generate a usable analysis of a 500k+ line log file
It's propaganda (Score:2)
Maybe they should make it accurately report what all Windows' stupid background services are ACTUALLY using for memory. I love how you sort by memory usage and the top 15 add up to about 4GB and your total RAM usage is 11GB. You used to have to have a rootkit to see something like that, back in the XP days. Now they just do it to cover up what an inefficient shit show Windows 11 is.
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Really? Mine shows all that. Are you sure you're having it display the correct columns?
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.
Could explain battery drain (Score:1)
Highlighting GPU use could either 1) reasonably give insight into how much power is actually being used, or 2) provide an easy scapegoat for poor laptop battery performance. "Oh, the battery is not the problem- it's that you're using too much AI."
But is Microsoft Honest About Their Usage? (Score:2)
It would be interesting to do a power-consumption test on Windows versions.
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.
humble opinion (Score:3)
It seems like every team in Microsoft is trying to attach AI to the part they work on whether it makes sense or not.
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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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> 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:2)
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.
Re: humble opinion (Score:2)
An NPU is a piece of hardware just like a GPU.
Re: humble opinion (Score:2)
So if it is a piece of hardware that should be in taskmgr why is it only being added now? I know GPUs have been around for a long time.
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Task Manager's expanded view does include GPU monitoring and has done for quite some time now, but it wasn't added until they achieved a certain level of market ubiquity (and, presumably, the relevant APIs were in place). I'm guessing that Microsoft now feels that NPUs have reached a similar state and will be adding the extra "NPU" sub-tab to the existing Performance tab where other hardware resources are monitored, and adding some additional AI-related monitoring functionality to the existing GPU one.
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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I suspect it's because procexp64 counts as a debugging tool. I've had DRM/anticheat protected games refuse to launch because it was running. I was PISSED! Spent a lot of time yelling at whichever vendor it was.
But 100% yes, I agree. I love Sysinternals.
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Oh, and task manager does show GPU memory usage. You have to enable the column in the Details view, but it can show dedicated and shared GPU and NPU memory use.
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The available information isn't terribly specific; but on the surface it doesn't sound any deeper into application internals than it already does.
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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I don't see it that way at all. Task manager on my laptop with an NPU now has a graph for NPU usage next to the graph for GPU usage. And it took them a long time to add that GPU graph. Task manager isn't doing anything new, it's still just showing resource use for each application.
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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They expanded task manager to finally include per process GPU utilization. What exactly is your complaint? If this is a problem for you rip out your GPU.
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.
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.