A NPU (Neural Processing Unit), also knows as AI accelerator, is a computing unit specially designed for the running artificial intelligence and machine learning models efficiently and effectively on a single motherboard with other computing units.
There has been significant rise in the use of NPUs in personal devices like smartphones, laptops, PCs etc. to do personalized recommendations and offline AI processing.
NPUs are capable of parallel processing, low precision arithmetic, hardware acceleration.
These have silicon architecture to kind of simulate the human brain working like human where instruction set of AI efficiently ran. NPUs are not for computing traditional problems as it lacks important physical capabilities. Because of these, AI systems are able to learn faster without wasting time and energy. The parallel computation feature give wings to matrix operations ease, activation functions of neural networks, dot product.
NPUs have got dedicated compute units for activation functions, memory hierarchy, SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data), fixed-point arithmetic units. Each have been implemented for improved AI performance.
GPU are also good but they are power hungry beasts that have more wider use case meanwhile CPUs are general purpose.
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