Samsung is set to join the bandwagon of producers of Neural Processing Units (NPU). Last year, Apple and Huawei released their NPU enabled handsets. Reports out of South Korea says that Samsung is looking forward to surpassing the capabilities of the NPU’s produced by its competitors. To show how serious it is Samsung set up its artificial intelligence research facility led by Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology a couple of months ago.
Huawei claims that its NPU, the Kirin 970 SoCs, performs up to 4 Tera operations per second, while Apple’s A11 Bionic reaches 600 Giga operations per second. Last year, Apple released the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 plus and the iPhone X enabled with NPU which allows its users to experience features like animated emoji and facial recognition. While the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro enabled with an NPU can learn your habits after some time. Samsung is not the only ones interested in AI chips as Microsoft is also integrating a separate co-processor into its next-generation HoloLens mixed reality headset.
Samsung has reportedly developed an AI chip that matches the capabilities of both the NPU’s developed by Huawei and Apple. Samsung equally plans to surpass its competitors by developing more advanced chips during the second half of the year.
NPUs will enhance and accelerate the abilities of mobile devices and enable servers to run the AI-based software. Devices with NPU can process, analyse and store data directly on their devices instead of requiring a cloud server for data communication and storage during AI processing. Although Samsung lags behind its competitors, the Korean tech giant is likely to exhibit its AI capabilities at the MWC in Barcelona next month with the Samsung Galaxy S9 as its first NPU device.
Samsung’s first AI chips are reportedly ready for implementation in devices later this year while the Galaxy S9 will reportedly launch on February 25th.
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