Ο race for AI (Artificial Intelligence) is quite interesting, mainly because of its dynamic and multifaceted nature. While most still associate the term AI with Voice Assistants, the industry as a whole has made serious strides behind the scenes, optimizing all sorts of tasks such as image recognition and graphics rendering. The big companies are trying to get out first as the sector is decisive for the future of their products and theirs!
At the moment, Samsung is well behind its rivals. The Korean giant is trying to fill the gap and it looks like it will try with the second generation of its own specialized neural processing (NPU) microship, according to various sources, most recently the LinkedIn resume of a former employee. This means that we can expect the new microship in the upcoming Exynos 9820 chipset and thus in the Samsung Galaxy S10 family.
Samsung may have completed its second-generation NPU architecture internally, which may be piggybacked on the Exynos 9820 processor. pic.twitter.com/kIUNZkQSRc
- Ice universe (@UniverseIce) October 6, 2018
The US and China, among other markets where Samsung uses Qualcomm SoC, will not be left without Artificial Intelligence as Qualcomm tries to integrate its own NPU microchip into its next chipset, which looks like it will be the Snapdragon 8150.
Huawei and Apple are currently leading the way with their own respective NPU implementations. The A12 Bionic has an octa-core Neural Engine, capable of 5 trillion operations per second, while the Kirin 980 has a new Dual NPU that can process 4500 images per minute. As there is no single workload scenario there is no suitable measurement to directly compare the two implementations.
Artificial Intelligence is going to be implemented with the best in companies in hardware and software in the future and is expected to directly affect our mobile phones in the near future.
