AI accelerator
Hardware acceleration unit for artificial intelligence tasks / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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An AI accelerator, deep learning processor, or neural processing unit (NPU) is a class of specialized hardware accelerator[1] or computer system[2][3] designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and machine vision. Typical applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of Things, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks.[4] They are often manycore designs and generally focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability. As of 2024[update], a typical AI integrated circuit chip contains tens of billions of MOSFETs.[5]
AI accelerators are used in mobile devices, such as neural processing units (NPUs) in Apple iPhones[6], AMD Laptops[7] or Huawei cellphones,[8] and personal computers such as Apple silicon Macs, to cloud computing servers such as tensor processing units (TPU) in the Google Cloud Platform.[9] A number of vendor-specific terms exist for devices in this category, and it is an emerging technology without a dominant design.
Graphics processing units designed by companies such as Nvidia and AMD often include AI-specific hardware, and are commonly used as AI accelerators, both for training and inference.[10]