hardware//chip//ASIC

An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a chip designed for exactly one task. Unlike a general-purpose CPU or a programmable MCU, its logic is frozen at fab time: the mathematics is embedded as silicon, so \(y = mx + n\) is computed on the circuit with no instruction overhead.

An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a chip designed for exactly one task. Unlike a general-purpose CPU or a programmable MCU, its logic is frozen at fab time: the mathematics is embedded as silicon, so y=mx+ny = mx + ny=mx+n is computed on the circuit with no instruction overhead.

It delivers maximum throughput per watt for fixed workloads such as Bitcoin mining, video encoding and network packet processing. Design cost is high, so ASICs only make sense at volume.

Many of the blocks inside MCUs and SoCs are ASICs: TPU, NIC, NPU, DSP, GPU, ISP. A DSP, for instance, turns a sound wave into a spectrogram and filters noise with Fourier transforms.

Google's TPUs are ML-focused ASICs, with no core intelligence and pure matrix math.