It's about power management, and doing more things with less power. These specialized IP blocks on CPUs allow these things to be done with less power and less latency.
Intel's bottom of the barrel N95 & N100 CPUs have Gaussian & Neural accelerators for simple image processing and object detection tasks, plus a voice processor for low power voice based activation and command capture and process.
You can always add more power hungry, general purpose components to add capabilities. Heck, video post processing entered hardware era with ATI Radeon 8500. But doing these things with negligible power costs is the new front.
Apple is not adding coprocessors to their iPhones because it looks nice. All of these coprocessors reduce CPU wake-up cycles tremendously and allows the device to monitor tons of things out of bands with negligible power costs.
Intel's bottom of the barrel N95 & N100 CPUs have Gaussian & Neural accelerators for simple image processing and object detection tasks, plus a voice processor for low power voice based activation and command capture and process.
You can always add more power hungry, general purpose components to add capabilities. Heck, video post processing entered hardware era with ATI Radeon 8500. But doing these things with negligible power costs is the new front.
Apple is not adding coprocessors to their iPhones because it looks nice. All of these coprocessors reduce CPU wake-up cycles tremendously and allows the device to monitor tons of things out of bands with negligible power costs.