Following in Huawei's footsteps, Samsung is reportedly working on dedicated AI processing chips

And Samsung, of all companies, should know that with its recent introduction of Bixby, one of the most universally despised features of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 (though, in its defense, this is mostly due to the inclusion of a dedicated Bixby button rather than any particular weakness of the assistant itself). But even after its fairly disastrous launch, Samsung seems to be dead set on making Bixby one of its biggest products.

Case in point: according to industry sources cited by The Korea Herald, Samsung is currently working on "several types" of dedicated AI processing chips. The crucial difference between them and current solution would be enabling for offline data processing — in simple terms, this means that rather than send all input data to Samsung, your phone can perform the necessary calculations by itself.

And if this sounds familiar, there's a fairly good reason for this: Huawei, a major competitor to Samsung both in the smartphone and the components markets, has already developed such a chip and has equipped its latest smartphone processor, the Kirin 970, with it.

And while the most obvious application of such a chip would be powering Bixby, it's worth noting that Samsung sells its chips to other companies as well. So with AI becoming ever more popular, the company could use this occasion as a potent revenue stream — though it remains in question whether its product will come soon enough to be relevant, as the sources claim the company plans on commercializing it "in the next few years."

source: The Korea Herlad