If you've been paying attention to Intel, AMD, or Apple in recent weeks, you may have been asking 'what is an NPU and why do I need one?' To many cons

What is an NPU: the new AI chips explained

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2024-05-08 00:00:05

If you've been paying attention to Intel, AMD, or Apple in recent weeks, you may have been asking 'what is an NPU and why do I need one?'

To many consumers, a computer simply has a processor and that's it, but the reality was already a bit more complicated than that. Now, thanks to new processor advances from Intel and AMD, it's about to get even more so.

Fortunately, you don't have to fend for yourself if you're shopping for a new Intel or AMD laptop with these new-fangled chips that claim to be heralding a new era of AI PCs. It's not as complex as it might seem, at least as far as you need to be concerned when looking to buy one of the best laptops on the market this year.

I'm here to walk you through everything you need to know about these new neural processing units and how they're going to help you with a whole new range of AI-accelerated tasks, from productivity to gaming.

An NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, is a dedicated processor or processing unit on a larger SoC designed specifically for accelerating neural network operations and AI tasks. Unlike general-purpose CPUs and GPUs, NPUs are optimized for a data-driven parallel computing, making them highly efficient at processing massive multimedia data like videos and images and processing data for neural networks. They are particularly adept at handling AI-related tasks, such as speech recognition, background blurring in video calls, and photo or video editing processes like object detection.