Artificial Intelligence (AI) relates to computer hardware in multiple ways, as follows:
- AI platforms are being used to optimize the design and manufacturing of new compute hardware systems.
- Special computer hardware processor units, referred to as AI accelerators or Neural Processing Units (NPU) are being developed to enhance the performance of AI applications and machine learning algorithms, which are implemented in software. Hardware accelerators are most frequently built by using electronic circuits such as FPGA, GPU, TPU and ASIC.
- AI algorithms and AI systems are fully or partially implemented natively in computer hardware (conventional RISC and CISC as well as quantum computing systems and photonic circuits, instead of running solely as computer software. Artificial Neural Network Architectures are being utilized also in new computer hardware architectures. Also artificial neural networks (ANN) are being implemented natively in hardware.
