For the near future actually using this power does cause a notable battery hit. We reached the point a while back with mobile 3D where you actively have to hold yourself back to stop draining the battery as so many devices will keep up frame rate wise to a surprising degree.
Mobile phones have taught us another annoying lesson though: edge compute will forever be under-utilized. I would go so far as to say now a huge proportion of the mainstream audience are simply not impressed by any advances in this area, the noise is almost entirely just developers.
Increased edge compute has brought a lot of consumer features if you take a step back and think about it. On-device, responsive speech recognition that doesn’t suck is now possible on watches and phones without a server round trip, and a ton of image processing such as subject classification and background detection is used heavily. Neither of those applications were even possible 5-7 years ago and now even the cheap stuff can do it.
Mobile phones have taught us another annoying lesson though: edge compute will forever be under-utilized. I would go so far as to say now a huge proportion of the mainstream audience are simply not impressed by any advances in this area, the noise is almost entirely just developers.