Phones don't need a NPU to benefit from machine learning

Neural Networks and Machine Learning are some of this year's biggest buzzwords in the world of smartphone processors. Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 970, Apple's A11 Bionic, and the image processing unit (IPU) inside the Google Pixel 2 all boast dedicated hardware support for this emerging technology. The trend so far has suggested that machine learning requires a dedicated piece of hardware, like a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), IPU, or "Neural Engine", as Apple would call it. However, the reality is these are all just fancy words for custom digital signal processors (DSP) -- that is, hardware specialized in performing complex mathematical functions quickly. Today's latest custom silicon has been specifically optimized around machine learning and neural network operations, the most common of which include dot product math and matrix multiply.