What do made-for-AI processors really do?

Last week, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 845, which sends AI tasks to the most suitable cores. There's not a lot of difference between the three company's approaches -- it ultimately boils down to the level of access each company offers to developers and how much power each setup consumes. Before we get into that though, let's figure out if an AI chip is really all that different from existing CPUs. A term you'll hear a lot in the industry with reference to AI lately is "heterogeneous computing." It refers to systems that use multiple types of processors, each with specialized functions, to gain performance or save energy.