Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The growing importance of AI in both professional and personal settings calls for the need for hardware acceleration for AI tasks.
Neural Processing Units deliver specific optimized methods that AI software can take advantage of to perform tasks even faster than before.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence aims to solve tasks that would ordinarily require human intelligence and capabilities.
In order to accomplish this, AI needs to be capable to process natural language, interpret images, learn independently and make decisions.
It's important to note that AI cannot be useful without access to huge datasets of information.
AI greatly improves the flexibility of software you might use every day. Instead of having to create specific solutions for each problem, an AI implementation can handle all of it on its own.
A few of the applications of AI today:
- Conversation
- Summarizing large texts
- Generating images from text description *the image of this blog was generated this way!
- Generating videos from text description
- Automating tasks
- Autonomous transportation
- Translating text or audio
- and much more!
AI will continue to evolve and will take up more significant portions of our professional and personal lives in the future.
What is Neural Processor Unit?
A Neural Processor Unit (NPU) is similar to a CPU or GPU found in computers.
An NPU is focused on accelerating AI workloads and frees up the rest of the computer to do other tasks.
Thanks to its specialization it's able to finish AI workloads much faster and with a lower energy cost than traditional computing.
More and more devices will contain an NPU as AI grows in importance over time.
NPUs today
NPUs are already in use today in various shapes and forms.
A good example of this in graphics cards where one of their uses is to improve the performance of video games.
Another example is in smartphones where NPUs are used to for a wide variety of tasks like improving photos, translating text, voice services, personal assistant and so on.
Devices that already have NPUs today:
Conclusion
AI is transforming our lives and will only become more important as time goes on.
An NPU will grow in importance alongside AI itself in order to make it work as well as it can.
