Adam Labancz, Microsoft

There’s no doubt that we are living in the Age of AI. For many, it seems that no industry has been left untouched, with AI swiftly embedding itself into nearly every business process. Amid this AI shift, Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are making headlines as the newest chip on the block, but they’re not new. You might even already own an AI PC. A neural network is a type of AI model inspired by the way the brain works. It has interconnected nodes, called neurons, to process information.

In 2017, Apple introduced its own neural engine, the A11 Bionic chip. It consisted of two cores that could perform up to 600 billion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) for real-time processing of ML algorithms. In comparison, Apple’s newest M3 and M4 chips have 16 cores and can run up to 38 trillion TOPS (tera, or trillions, operations per second). Huawei also launched an NPU in 2017 in its Kirin 970 chipset. It was the first NPU on a mobile processor, designed so that its smartphones can handle AI tasks more efficiently.