Samsung has been reportedly working on the development of Neural Processing Units (NPU), also known as AI chips. These AI chips will be solely handling AI tasks on Samsung’s servers and mobiles phones arriving in the near future.
A source that is familiar with the development of AI chips at Samsung has revealed to a South Korean publication that the company has almost finished working on the AI chips for servers. The AI chips for the mobile devices by Samsung are on par with AI chips by Apple and Huawei. Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology is reportedly leading the development of its NPUs. The South Korean company is expected to produce better performing NPUs in the latter half of 2018.
Samsung began working on AI chips after Apple and Huawei had respectively introduced AI enabled A11 Bionic and Kirin 970 chipsets. Even though the company has started late, it has managed to catch up with its rivals pretty fast. The NPU of Apple and Huawei have reach 600 giga operations per second and 4 tera operations per second. Samsung’s NPU can reportedly deliver slightly higher operations per second than its competitors.
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The iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X that were launched last year feature dedicated NPU for handling AI tasks so does the Huawei Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro and Honor V10 smartphones. When a NPU is added to a smartphone in addition to the main chipset and GPU, the device is able to analyze, process and store data produced on it without using a cloud server.
The official revealed that Samsung may showcase its NPU capabilities through upcoming flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ on Feb. 25 in Barcelona. Rumors have suggested that the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ models arriving in the U.S. and China may feature Snapdragon 845 SoC whereas the newly unveiled Exynos 9810 may power the models of the S9 duo arriving in other markets. An enhanced NPU is likely to available with the Galaxy Note 9 that is speculated to launch in September this year.
