Vision processing unit

A vision processing unit (VPU) is (as of 2016) an emerging class of microprocessor; it is a specific type of AI accelerator, designed to accelerate machine vision tasks.

Vision processing units are distinct from video processing units (which are specialised for video encoding and decoding) in their suitability for running machine vision algorithms such as convolutional neural networks, SIFT etc.

They may include direct interfaces to take data from cameras (bypassing any off chip buffers), and have a greater emphasis on on-chip dataflow between many parallel execution units with scratchpad memory, like a manycore DSP. But, like video processing units, they may have a focus on low precision fixed point arithmetic for image processing.

They are distinct from GPUs, which contain specialised hardware for rasterization and texture mapping (for 3D graphics), and whose memory architecture is optimised for manipulating bitmap images in off-chip memory (reading textures, and modifying frame buffers, with random access patterns).

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