Neural Processing Units (NPU) are another more native approach. Since 2017, several CPUs and SoCs have on-die NPUs: for example, [[Meteor Lake (microarchitecture)|Intel Meteor Lake]], [[Lunar Lake]], and [[Apple A11]].
== Nomenclature ==
As of 2016, the field is still in flux and vendors are pushing their own marketing term for what amounts to an "AI accelerator", in the hope that their designs and [[application programming interface|APIs]] will become the [[dominant design]]. There is no consensus on the boundary between these devices, nor the exact form they will take; however several examples clearly aim to fill this new space, with a fair amount of overlap in capabilities.
In the past when consumer [[graphics accelerator]]s emerged, the industry eventually adopted [[Nvidia]]'s self-assigned term, "the GPU",<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_20020111_5424.html |title=NVIDIA launches the World's First Graphics Processing Unit, the GeForce 256|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160227145622/http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_20020111_5424.html |archive-date=February 27, 2016 }}</ref>
as the collective noun for "graphics accelerators", which had taken many forms before {{Clarify|text=settling on an overall [[graphics pipeline|pipeline]] implementing a model presented by [[Direct3D]]|date=July 2024}}.
All models of Intel [[Meteor Lake]] processors have a ''Versatile Processor Unit'' (''VPU'') built-in for accelerating [[statistical inference|inference]] for computer vision and deep learning.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-to-bring-a-vpu-processor-unit-to-14th-gen-meteor-lake-chips|title=Intel to Bring a 'VPU' Processor Unit to 14th Gen Meteor Lake Chips|website=PCMAG|date=August 2022 }}</ref>
