iPhone 8 shipped an NPU in 2017 - among the first consumer electronics vendors to put dedicated AI acceleration into something. iPhone X then took advantage of that with TrueDepth and the infrastructure around it.
There was a real push from Apple at the time to enter the AI game - mainly for image processing purposes, which was the mainstream flavor of AI at the time.
alt Hacker News
iPhone 8 shipped an NPU in 2017 - among the first consumer electronics vendors to put dedicated AI acceleration into something. iPhone X then took advantage of that with TrueDepth and the infrastructure around it.
There was a real push from Apple at the time to enter the AI game - mainly for image processing purposes, which was the mainstream flavor of AI at the time.