{"id":299715,"date":"2025-12-05T02:48:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T02:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/299715\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T02:48:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T02:48:18","slug":"the-npu-in-your-phone-keeps-improving-why-isnt-that-making-ai-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/299715\/","title":{"rendered":"The NPU in your phone keeps improving\u2014why isn\u2019t that making AI better?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Qualcomm devotes significant time during its new product unveilings to talk about its Hexagon NPUs. Keen observers may recall that this branding has been reused from the company\u2019s line of digital signal processors (DSPs), and there\u2019s a good reason for that.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur journey into AI processing started probably 15 or 20 years ago, wherein our first anchor point was looking at signal processing,\u201d said Vinesh Sukumar, Qualcomm\u2019s head of AI products. DSPs have a similar architecture compared to NPUs, but they\u2019re much simpler, with a focus on processing audio (e.g., speech recognition) and modem signals.<\/p>\n


\n \"Qualcomm
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

The NPU is one of multiple components in modern SoCs.<\/p>\n

\n Credit:
\n Qualcomm\n <\/p>\n

\n The NPU is one of multiple components in modern SoCs.<\/p>\n

Credit:<\/p>\n

Qualcomm<\/p>\n

As the collection of technologies we refer to as \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d developed, engineers began using DSPs for more types of parallel processing, like long short-term memory (LSTM). Sukumar explained that as the industry became enamored with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the technology underlying applications like computer vision, DSPs became focused on matrix functions, which are essential to generative AI processing as well.<\/p>\n

While there is an architectural lineage here, it\u2019s not quite right to say NPUs are just fancy DSPs. \u201cIf you talk about DSPs in the general term of the word, yes, [an NPU] is a digital signal processor,\u201d said MediaTek Assistant Vice President Mark Odani. \u201cBut it\u2019s all come a long way and it\u2019s a lot more optimized for parallelism, how the transformers work, and holding huge numbers of parameters for processing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite being so prominent in new chips, NPUs are not strictly necessary for running AI workloads on the \u201cedge,\u201d a term that differentiates local AI processing from cloud-based systems. CPUs are slower than NPUs but can handle some light workloads without using as much power. Meanwhile, GPUs can often chew through more data than an NPU, but they use more power to do it. And there are times you may want to do that, according to Qualcomm\u2019s Sukumar. For example, running AI workloads while a game is running could favor the GPU.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Qualcomm devotes significant time during its new product unveilings to talk about its Hexagon NPUs. Keen observers may…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2306,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-299715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}