Samsung to make chips with dedicated cores for processing AI-related data
Samsung, the largest chip maker in the world, is in urgent need to make chipsets that have dedicated cores for processing artificial intelligence-related data. Although the company has released its AI-powered digital voice assistant Bixby for the Galaxy S8 duo and the Galaxy Note 8, the Exynos 8895 chipset that powers the phones do not have a dedicated processing unit for AI-related tasks. Samsung has now embarked on research and development of AI chips and is planning to commercialize them in the next few years.
Huawei has announced that it will release its Mate 10 smartphone with its new Kirin 970 chipset that has a neural processing unit. Even Apple has launched three new smartphones – iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X – which use the A11 Bionic SoC, featuring a “Neural Engine” that will help in machine learning tasks. “(Samsung) is in the middle of developing several types of chips that will be capable of processing massive data from AI applications on devices, eliminating the need to communicate with cloud servers,” an industrial source from one of Samsung’s partners told The Korea Herald.
Currently, data processed by AI apps such as voice recognition and machine learning are stored in the cloud and recalled when needed. With chips that have dedicated AI-related processing units, data can be stored and processed locally, which will improve the performance of AI features by 50 percent compared to current-generation chipsets. A lot of startups and tech giants are now focussing on improving the performance of their AI-powered devices. Market intelligence firm TrendForce says that AI will become the major growth factor in the future.
Samsung officially hinted at a technology forum that its new chipsets will have some AI-related features. Kim Ki-nam, president of Samsung’s semiconductor business, said, “The existing central processing unit and graphic processing unit chips make it hard to achieve efficiency in AI computing. The NPU will help address the efficiency challenge. However, NPUs so far have storage capacities that are equivalent to a thousandth of a human brain.” The company invested $300 million in Graphcore, a British AI chip startup, in order to overcome its limits.
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estou um pouco arrependido de ter comprado o s8+. comprei dois um pra mim e outro pra minha esposa o aparelho em si é bonito coisa e tal mais a bixby nao funciona e esse foi o principal motivo de ter migrado do s7 edde pra s8 +antes tivesse ficado com s7 ate o presado momento temos um s7 com um botao a mais
Samsung is starting to lag behind considerably. They should have started with more dedicated processing cores and their own gpu long time ago. Apple and soon Chinese manufacturers have much faster overal processing power.
Are there patent problems? Or ip problems?
How are they lagging behind when they’re leading the chip manufacturing in the world. companies all over are using their chips. They’ll work on dedicated chips when they feel they need to/should do. Apple is a law unto themselves because they have their own devices with their own operating system. You should be asking why it took Apple 10 years to create their first GPU?!
AI Chips are just in their early stage
As a first release, Bixby is pretty good. looking forward to what they do in the future with dedicated chips
If only they weren’t limited by Android, Samsung clearly has a different vision to google and the difficulty of adding features as well as building on top of Android. It’s a bit of a shame that nobody wants to develop apps for Tizen so they wouldn’t have to keep juggling Android updates with their own projects.
If Tizen took off and had as much features and support as Android, I’d jump on board immediately. I bet Samsung wound do a much better job then.