The overnight spike settled whether frank-tts can run on the Strix Halo NPU.
It cannot, and the wall is the loader, not the silicon: AMD's own Linux
runtime opens /dev/accel/accel0, succeeds at the GEM ioctls, then declines
the NuTTS-Air graph without emitting a single log line — and the one run that
did load has never reproduced. The accelerator that does exist is the gfx1151
iGPU behind -DGGML_VULKAN=ON, a flag our own Containerfile.engine writes OFF,
and Frank set the target shape to co-tenancy: the engine resident beside
frank-dragoon, not a handover.
- report/tts-npu-spike-verdict-2026-10-19.md owns the measured result: the
exoneration chain, the two arms' real-time bars (12.5 codes/s deployed vs
50.00 for NuTTS-Air), the 65,536-entry speech-token census (ids
151,671-217,206), the host gates (rootless cannot read accel0; dpkg-deb the
vendor XRT, never dpkg -i), the iGPU census (18,523 of 116,733 MiB GTT in
use, 17 GiB host RAM available, GTT pages are host pages), the two gates
that decide co-tenancy (RADV heap for an APU tenant; dragoon's TTFT with a
synthesis in flight), and the five-file change surface for the trial.
- report/npu-tts-runtime-landscape-2026-10-19.md and
report/qwen3-tts-payload-portability-2026-10-19.md are the research slices;
both now point at the verdict page instead of ending in loose ends.
- The vault page gains "Where the engine computes", so an operator doing a TTS
task learns the NPU is a closed door without re-walking it.
No fleet change: frank-tts / frank-tts-engine still serve narrator1-3 on CPU.
tests: ./tests/run.sh 450/450 green.
Frank
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