The 7940HS shipped before recall and doesn't support it because it is not performant enough, so, that doesn't make sense.
I just gave you a use case, mine in particular uses it for background blur and eye contact filters with the webcam and uses essentially no power to do it. If I do the same filters with nvidia broadcast, the power usage is dramatically higher.
I doubt there's no notable power draw, NPUs in general have always pulled a handful of watts which should at least about match a modern CPU's idle draw. But it does seem odd that your power usage doesn't change at all, it might be always powered on or something.
Eye contact filters seem like a horrible thing, autocorrect won't work better than a dictionary with a tiny model and I doubt these things can come even close to running whisper for decent voice transcription. Background blur alright, but that's kind of stretching it. I always figured Zoom/Teams do these things serverside anyway.
And alright, if it's not MS making them do it, then they're just chasing the fad themselves while also shipping subpar hardware. Not sure if that makes it better.
Intel is also about to launch their first desktop processors with an NPU which falls far short of Microsoft's performance requirements for a "Copilot+ PC". Should still be plenty for webcam use.
I just gave you a use case, mine in particular uses it for background blur and eye contact filters with the webcam and uses essentially no power to do it. If I do the same filters with nvidia broadcast, the power usage is dramatically higher.