Dedicated AI unit likely to appear in Samsung Galaxy S10
Keeping track of the amazing AI race is getting more difficult by the day, as it’s gaining speed before our eyes. AI is already a part of our lives, mostly as voice assistants of various degrees of sophistication. However, while still uncommon on the mass market, there are many fascinating developments that will be implemented in the near future. Thes include graphics rendering, image recognitions, and man others.
The major manufacturers are already actively researching various options and developing the hardware to back the inventions up. Samsung is currently slightly behind in the rat race to be the leader of the AI implementation in mobile technology. It’s bound to catch up soon, though, as the Korean corporation is already about to come out with the NPU (neural processing unit) chip, as the rumors go. The last source of this information is the LinkedIn profile of an ex-employee.
The chip is likely to be launched in the flagship chipset Exynos 9820, which will be installed in the upcoming phones from the Samsung Galaxy S10 family. The all-new chip will handle all the tasks handled by the Vision Processing Unit chip in previous models. The new hardware is far more advanced and optimized, making it truly a new-generation option. For those who are wondering - yes, the phone models with the new chip will be available in the United States along with other markets where Qualcomm chips are utilized by Samsung. Hexagon DSP was used in the Snapdragon 845 chip to handle all machine learning, audio and graphics needs, and now Qualcomm is planning to introduce a proprietary NPU into the upcoming flagship chipset - Snapdragon 8150.
Samsung is taking this unexpected step, which seems progressive but is in fact reactionary from a certain perspective. It has always strived for feature parity between its Snapdragon and Exynos versions, while with Qualcomm putting a lot of effort into this development, Exynos also needs to put some steam into it.
AI processing is hot, and relevant work is very active everywhere in the mobile industry. Huawei and Apple are currently the two major players in the field, and are introducing their proprietary NPU setups. A12 Bionic boasts an 8-core Neural Engine, which can pull off an impressive 5 trillion operations per second, and Kirin 980 presents a new Dual NPU with the capacity of 4500 images per minute. The competition is still on, and will be for a long while, since there isn’t a specific indicator for the comparison of the two. AI is clearly the next huge thing, and it can only get stronger in all tech sectors, especially mobile, in the years and decades to come.
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