It's an Image Processing Unit. Architecturally I'd expect it to look like a GPU, maybe with something like the new matrix-multiply unit from their TPU. https://www.slideshare.net/AntoniosKatsarakis/tensor-process...

Edit: wrong name

So I'm seeing this and another comment downvoted. Is that because you're wrong? If so, can one of the people downvoting (or someone else) expand and actually answer the original question?

It does not have a TPU matrix multiply unit.

That unit is massive, and wouldn't fit in a small die like this.

It seems likely it's optimized for the same kind of operations though, even if it doesn't have a matrix multiply unit.

I would guess the main intended use for this silicon is running neural networks, even though the initial use case is for photos.

Nearly all AI things on phones (voice recognition, google assistant's local features, keyboard predictive language model, offline translation, etc.) are severely compute limited, and could perform much better with this silicon.

Some features are obvious candidates to put on-device, like realtime recognition of the contents of a photo, realtime wavenet voice synthesis, yet compute limitations preclude it.

You got down voted but the way Google has been acting I wouldn't be surprised.