unit

Definition

A generic word for "one element of processing", where the surrounding term fixes the meaning. In hardware it is the U of GPU, TPU, and NPU — a physical processing engine. In network descriptions it means a single neuron: hidden units, and the rectified linear unit that gives ReLU its name. The two senses sit at opposite ends of the stack, so read the compound rather than the word.

Explainers using this term

• Systolic Arrays — Building the Heart of the TPU From ScratchIn-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit
• How AI Accelerators Are Designed — What Actually Separates GPUs, NPUs, and TPUsIn-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit