So I'm seeing this and another comment downvoted. Is that because you're wrong? If so, can one of the people downvoting (or someone else) expand and actually answer the original question?
That unit is massive, and wouldn't fit in a small die like this.
It seems likely it's optimized for the same kind of operations though, even if it doesn't have a matrix multiply unit.
I would guess the main intended use for this silicon is running neural networks, even though the initial use case is for photos.
Nearly all AI things on phones (voice recognition, google assistant's local features, keyboard predictive language model, offline translation, etc.) are severely compute limited, and could perform much better with this silicon.
Some features are obvious candidates to put on-device, like realtime recognition of the contents of a photo, realtime wavenet voice synthesis, yet compute limitations preclude it.
Is it like a integer GPU? The massive amount of ALUs suggests something like that.
But later, I see "Notably, because Pixel Visual Core is programmable, we’re already preparing the next set of applications.". So, is it FPGA-like?