What Do The AI Chips In New Smartphones Actually Do?

Artificial intelligence is coming to your phone. The iPhone X has a Neural Engine as part of its A11 Bionic chip; the Huawei Kiri 970 chip has what's called a Neural Processing Unit or NPU on it; and the Pixel 2 has a secret AI-powered imaging chip that just got activated. So what exactly are these next-gen chips designed to do? As mobile chipsets have grown smaller and more sophisticated, they have started to take on more jobs and more different kinds of jobs. Case in point, integrated graphics -- GPUs now sit alongside CPUs at the heart of high-end smartphones, handling all the heavy lifting for the visuals so the main processor can take a breather or get busy with something else.