The influence of NPUs and AI chips on the evolution of smartphone and PC roadmaps
Neural Processing Units, commonly called NPUs, are specialized processors designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. Unlike CPUs, which handle general-purpose tasks, or GPUs, which excel at parallel graphics and compute operations, NPUs focus on matrix math, inference, and on-device learning with extreme efficiency. Alongside NPUs, the broader category of AI chips includes dedicated accelerators integrated into system-on-a-chip designs or offered as discrete components in PCs and servers.Over the past five years, AI workloads have shifted from cloud-centric processing toward on-device intelligence. This shift is driven by latency requirements, privacy concerns, and the need for energy efficiency. As…
