WHAT THE HECK IS AN NPU, ANYWAY? HERE'S AN EXPLAINER ON AI CHIPS

ALL PCS WILL SOON HAVE NEURAL PROCESSING UNITS. HERE'S WHAT THAT MEANS FOR YOU IN SIMPLE TERMS.

- CHRIS HOFFMAN

CPUs and GPUs are old news. These days, the cutting edge for chips is all about NPUs, and hardware manufacturers are talking up NPU performance.

The NPU is a computer component designed to accelerate AI tasks in a power-efficient manner, paving the way for new Windows desktop applications with powerful AI features. That’s the plan, anyway.

All PCs will eventually have NPUs, but at the moment only some PCs have them. Here’s everything you need to know about NPUs and why they’re such a hot topic in the computer industry right now.

WHAT IS AN NPU?

NPU stands for neural processing unit. It’s a special kind of processor that’s optimized for AI and machine-learning tasks.

The name comes from the fact that AI models use neural networks. A neural network is, in layman’s terms, a vast mesh of interconnected nodes that pass information between them. (The whole idea was modeled after the way our own human brains work.)

An NPU isn’t a separate device that you buy and plug-in (as you would with a GPU, for example). Instead, an NPU is “packaged” as part of a modern processor platform—like Intel’s Core Ultra, AMD’s Ryzen AI, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus. These platforms have a CPU along with an integrated GPU and NPU.

NPU VERSUS CPU VERSUS GPU: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? EXPLAINED

For many years now, computers have been running tasks on either the central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU). That’s still how it works on AI PCs (that is, computers with NPUs).