Yeah, but do either of those match the aims?
If you have a face unlock, you only rarely need to run it. It's not like you're constantly doing face recognition on a stream of video. You don't have the power-consumption problem.
If you have an archive of 10000 photos, you probably don't need to do the computation on battery power, and you probably don't mind using a GPU to do it.
I mean, I can definitely imagine systems that constantly run facial recognition, like security cameras set up to surveil and identify large crowds of people in public areas, but:
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I suspect that most of them want access to a big database of face data. I don't know how many cases you have a disconnected system with a large database of face data.
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I doubt that most of those need to be running on a battery.
The reason I mention speech recognition is because I can legitimately see a laptop user wanting to constantly be processing an incoming audio stream, like to take in voice commands (the "Alexa" model, but not wanting to send recorded snippets elsewhere).