(1) (
Accelerated
Processing
Unit) A chip that contains both the CPU and GPU. See
GPU and
AMD Fusion.
(2) (
Application
Processing
Unit) Another term for CPU, an APU is a general-purpose processor in contrast to specialized processors for graphics, voice, photos, etc. The APU term is typically found on a system-on-chip (SoC), which houses several different processing units. See
SoC,
GPU,
DSP and
image processor.