Editing Coprocessor (section)

==Modern coprocessors==
{{As of|2001}}, dedicated Graphics Processing Units ([[graphics processing unit|GPU]]s) in the form of [[graphics card]]s are commonplace. Certain models of [[sound card]]s have been fitted with dedicated processors providing digital multichannel mixing and real-time DSP effects as early as 1990 to 1994 (the [[Gravis Ultrasound]] and [[Sound Blaster AWE32]] being typical examples), while the [[Sound Blaster Audigy]] and the [[Sound Blaster X-Fi]] are more recent examples.

In 2006, [[AGEIA]] announced an add-in card for computers that it called the [[PhysX]] [[Physics processing unit|PPU]].  PhysX was designed to perform complex physics computations so that the [[central processing unit|CPU]] and GPU do not have to perform these time-consuming calculations. It was designed for video games, although other mathematical uses could theoretically be developed for it. In 2008, Nvidia purchased the company and phased out the PhysX card line; the functionality was added through software allowing their GPUs to render PhysX on cores normally used for graphics processing, using their Nvidia PhysX engine software.

In 2006, BigFoot Systems unveiled a PCI add-in card they christened the KillerNIC which ran its own special Linux kernel on a FreeScale [[PowerQUICC]] running at 400&nbsp;MHz, calling the FreeScale chip a [[Network Processing Unit]] or NPU.

The [[SpursEngine]] is a media-oriented add-in card with a coprocessor based on the [[Cell (microprocessor)|Cell]] microarchitecture. The [[Cell (microprocessor)#SPUs|SPUs]] are themselves vector coprocessors.

In 2008, [[Khronos Group]] released the [[OpenCL]] with the aim to support general-purpose CPUs, ATI/AMD and Nvidia GPUs (and other accelerators) with a single common language for [[compute kernel]]s.

In 2010s, some mobile computation devices had implemented the [[sensor hub]] as a coprocessor. Examples of coprocessors used for handling sensor integration in mobile devices include the [[Apple M7]] and M8 [[Apple motion coprocessors|motion coprocessors]], the [[Qualcomm Snapdragon#Sensor Core|Qualcomm Snapdragon Sensor Core]] and [[Qualcomm Hexagon]], and the [[Windows Holographic#Hardware|Holographic Processing Unit]] for the [[Windows Holographic#Microsoft HoloLens|Microsoft HoloLens]].

In 2012, [[Intel]] announced the [[Intel Xeon Phi]] coprocessor.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/11/12/intel-delivers-new-architecture-for-discovery-with-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors?cid=rss-258152-c1-278335 |title=Intel Delivers New Architecture for Discovery with Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessors |publisher=Newsroom.intel.com |date=2012-11-12 |access-date=2013-06-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130603221744/http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/11/12/intel-delivers-new-architecture-for-discovery-with-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors?cid=rss-258152-c1-278335 |archive-date=2013-06-03 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

{{As of|2016}}, various companies are developing coprocessors aimed at accelerating [[artificial neural networks]] for vision and other cognitive tasks (e.g. [[vision processing unit]]s, [[TrueNorth]], and [[Zeroth (software)|Zeroth]]), and as of 2018, such AI chips are in smartphones such as from Apple, and several Android phone vendors.