Special issue on SoC and AI processors

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved into a general technology for a wide range of purposes and has been applied in all aspects of economy and society. It has already been extensively used in various fields, including medical services, finance, security, education, transportation, and logistics, and had led to the emergence of new commercial activities, business models, and game‐changing product applications. AI is a driving force to economic and social development at the forefront of the technological revolution and industrial transformation. Additionally, System‐on‐a‐Chip (SoC) plays a vital role in post‐PC era products like smartphones, tablets, and various wearable devices where form‐factor, cost, and energy‐efficiency, are critical drivers. It contains multiple processing parts such as the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), image processing unit (IPU), digital signal processor (DSP), video encoder/decoder, modems, and neural processing unit (NPU). Specifically, AI processors, another name for NPU, are specially optimized for mathematics and algorithms commonly used by neural networks. They can run neural networks and machine learning tasks faster and more efficiently than CPUs.