Yes. The Qualcomm white paper above states that their NPU evolved from the DSP, and it looks like they are sticking with it.As I understand it, the NPU (which is easily confused for neuromorphic because of the 'N') is another dedicated processor that parallelizes computational operations with the CPU and GPU at lower power requirements.
Qualcomm's Hexagon NPU is designed to offload those computations from the other two and is optimized for vector, matrix, and tensor processing (basically a lot of matrix math). I ran across an interesting thread on Hacker News, where someone benchmarked the NPU and found that it was not quite as good as the CPU itself. Again, the NPU intends to achieve performance through parallelization at lower power. They have the code for their benchmarks here on GitHub.
I believe Akida could still be a strong competitor to Qualcomm's AI offerings, or even potentially a replacement for Hexagon for better real-time processing on power-constrained devices.
"Building our NPU from a DSP architecture was the right choice for improved programmability and the ability to tightly control scalar, vector, and tensor operations that are inherent to AI processing. Our design approach of optimized scalar, vector, and tensor acceleration combined with large local shared memory, dedicated power delivery systems, and other hardware acceleration differentiates our solution."
"You know, I reckon if we put a supercharger on this Model T, it'll be as good as the rest."
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