Why your next PC will have an NPU

Microsoft has been investing a lot in machine learning, working with silicon vendors to support running AI models on your PC as fast as possible. This has required the development of a whole new generation of silicon from Intel, AMD and ARM. Often called "AI accelerators," neural processing units are dedicated hardware that handle specific machine learning tasks such as computer vision algorithms. You can think of them much like a GPU, but for AI rather than graphics. They often share a lot of features with GPUs, having many relatively low precision processor cores that implement common machine learning algorithms.