Development of the VPU

With the advent of AI, image recognition, and neural networks, there has been the emergence of a new category of processor, or functionality broadly known as a visual processing unit, or VPU. The name belies the real importance of the function and so we prefer to refer to it in the awkward term of VPU and neural network accelerator, which results in the mind-numbing acronym of VPNNA, or VPNA. But what makes a processor a vision processor? In many regards, “You'll know one when you see one” covers the situation but there are some things that can be easily specified.