Are there any exmaples of ASICs that we would find in everyday smart devices like an iPhone? I can mostly think of them being used in embedded systems, which have very specific applications.

@rahulahoop Yes. One of the highlights of recent iPhone's bionic chip is the Neural Engine, which is basically a chip dedicated to neural network inference. I believe this should be counted as an ASIC

@rahulahoop @leave I'd say something like the video encoding/decoding is a more accurate answer. There are definitely dedicated ASICs for that, as the slide lists. I'm not familiar with the iPhone's architecture but I'd wager that the Neural Engine must be more of a domain-specific accelerator. The difference is that they're not burning a specific neural network in hardware, but rather accelerating that general class of algorithms, which ends up being pretty similar to TPUs, say. The key thing is that ASICs are not programmable.

Are there more examples of the distinction between domain-specific accelerators and ASICs? What's the granularity difference in terms of which tasks these devices can handle?

Are all of these considered programming chips? Or are processors considered a part of a chip or are these all CPU/GPUS?

Is this why Apple silicon recently performs so much better than the previous Intel silicon did, they have the money to design extremely specialized hardware for their machines?