It’s been a little over eight years since we first started talking about Neural Processing Units (NPUs) inside our smartphones and the early prospects of on-device AI. Big points if you remember that the HUAWEI Mate 10’s Kirin 970 processor was the first, though similar ideas had been floating around, particularly in imaging, before then.
Of course, a lot has changed in the last eight years — Apple has finally embraced AI, albeit with mixed results, and Google has obviously leaned heavily into its Tensor Processor Unit for everything from imaging to on-device language translation. Ask any of the big tech companies, from Arm and Qualcomm to Apple and Samsung, and they’ll all tell you that AI is the future of smartphone hardware and software.