Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a bit of a buzzword these days, as companies in the industry make an effort to differentiate their offerings. In 2017, both Apple and Huawei released hardware designed to accelerating AI on their in-house chips — Apple’s A11 Bionic system-on-chip featured the Neural Engine, and Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 970 had a Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
Now, Samsung has nearly completed development of its own AI chips, according to a report by The Investor. The company is reportedly “almost done” with a hardware line optimized for servers, and it expects to commercialize it in the coming months.
On the mobile device side of things, Samsung is said to have matched the technical achievements of Apple and Huawei.
Apple claims that its Neural Engine has reached 600 giga operations per second (GOPS), while Huawei claims to have reached 4 tera operations per second (TOPS). (In computing, GOPS and TOPS are measurements of floating point calculations by second.) The Investor‘s source estimates that Samsung’s AI chip have similar or “slightly higher” performance.
Samsung is likely to show off some of its AI chips’ capabilities in the Galaxy S9, its upcoming flagship smartphone, which is expected to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress next month. Samsung’s also said to be “particularly dedicated” to developing an enhanced NPU for the Galaxy Note 9, which is tentatively pegged for a September launch. The company has been increasing its R&D effort to develop NPUs by collaborating with outside professionals at South Korea’s top universities, and it’s working on various AI projects with professors and researchers.
Source: The Investor