Since then, AI has become a booming business, with a multicompany race to build the next generation of still faster AI hardware. The basic idea is to make the hardware increasingly specialized to AI tasks. One we have seen is convolution. Another is a recent scheme called transformers, to be discussed in chapter 10. Since these processors are specialized for AI and not graphics, the new term for this kind of processing unit is AI accelerator. Accelerators typically have the equivalent of several GPU processors.
