Samsung is making considerable advancements in AI chip design on its own and also in collaboration with others in the industry. Samsung and Naver, another major Korean tech company, have been jointly working on a new artificial intelligence chip over the past year.
The focus has been on power efficiency with this chip. It's said to be 8x more power efficient than competing chips from NVIDIA, currently considered as the developer of the gold standard of AI chips.
The chip promises similar performance at greater efficiency
Samsung and Naver had signed an MOU in December last year to develop AI semiconductors and created a practical task force to take the initiative forward. The AI chip was unveiled at a Ministry of Science and ICT event in Seoul. This new chip developed by Samsung and Naver will reportedly be used to power Naver's mega-scale AI model called HyperCLOVA X.
Revealed as a Field-Programmable Gate Array, this chip enables developers to make changes to the design that's mainly used in the production of prototypes before the chip is mass produced. This chip has been specialized for “inference,” which is the AI model's ability to produce logical outcomes after the model has completed its “learning” phase.
Naver claims that the chip has shown 8x more power efficiency compared to competing chips from NVIDIA. This was made possible by integrating low-power DRAM for greater efficiency, enabling the chip to offer the same computational performance with lower power consumption.
