If you’ve been weighing up a new laptop purchase, you’ll have no doubt spotted that they’re increasingly boasting NPU capabilities that sound an awful lot like the hardware we’ve seen in the very best smartphones for a number of years now. The driving factor is the push for laptops to catch up with mobile AI capabilities, embuing them with advanced AI features, like Microsoft’s Copilot, that can run securely on-device without needing an internet connection. So here’s everything you need to know about NPUs, why your next laptop might have one, and whether or not you should buy one.
What is an NPU?
NPU is an acronym for Neural Processing Unit. NPUs are dedicated to running mathematical functions associated with neural network/machine learning/AI tasks. While these can be standalone chips, they are increasingly integrated directly into a system-on-chip (SoC) alongside more familiar CPU and GPU components.