Samsung Android Phones Will Be Equipped With "Smart" RAM

Samsung phones will be equipped with more sophisticated RAM. (photo: unsplash)

Jakarta – Machine learning is already used in most smartphones. These features help with system performance, subtitles, voice commands, camera quality, and more. However, Samsung wants to take it a step further. This Android phone maker has just announced that they will be bringing smart technology to their RAM modules for their smartphones.

Samsung revealed that their in-memory processing (PIM) technology is coming to RAM. This is on top of the technology landing in the upgraded high-bandwidth DRAM and memory modules.

In a press release, Samsung mentioned that their LPDDR5-PIM technology will be able to provide independent AI capabilities without relying on data center connectivity. They also report that during simulation testing, LPDDR5-PIM more than doubled its performance, while reducing energy use by more than 60% when used in speech recognition, translation, and chatbot applications.

At first glance, this sounds great as it will significantly improve machine learning performance. However, there are still some unanswered questions by Samsung.

For one thing, at this stage, it is not clear whether PIM is the actual processor that will be installed in the RAM module. Or is it a suite of algorithms and optimizations?

If this is a real chip, will third-party developers and OEMs be able to access it for their own needs? Effectively deploy smart RAM to other Android or iOS devices.

Researchers are not sure how powerful this technology will be. Can it handle more advanced tasks like image processing and computer vision? Many smartphones already have chipsets capable of performing advanced machine learning tasks.

Most flagships also have AI silicon to further enhance these features. This leaves many researchers wondering if PIM-enabled RAM with a few grunts will allow OEMs for budget phones to use cheaper silicon and let smart RAM do most of the work.

Currently, there is no expected release date for the Samsung smart RAM. However, Samsung wants to fully standardize its PIM technology in the first half of 2022.

Samsung's smart RAM sounds like a great addition and will help improve the performance of various apps. However, researchers can't help but notice that there are still some unanswered questions. They're still looking forward to seeing what Samsung's next release will bring to these questions.