Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)

ASIC. Think specialized semiconductor. In the grand old days of the 1980s (when synthesizers ruled and shoulder pads were rad), computers were built almost exclusively with Intel chips inside. Those chips were "everything to everyone." Like superhero movies or McDonald's food, they were widely used, but limited if you wanted anything other than the blandest possible experience. They processed data in doing math in a highly generic form.

For better or worse, the world began to digest data in vastly differing forms. Some data, like voice calls, are bursty--lots of data when someone's talking, little to none when they're not. Then you have video games and mobile apps, which rely on highly dense coloring, and the passing of complex rhomboid shapes to create human looking characters. And then there's wireless events, trying to connect disparate lonely wave signals into many different forms of operating systems, in and around telephones.

So ASICs chips specialize each of these functions and optimally address the way in which that data is digested, stored, and puked.