Consistent with what they said at the developer’s conference about wanting to extend the reach of their A.I. Samsung has announced a new System on Chip (SoC) with some A.I. related features. The Exynos 9 Series 9820 processor. The processor contains an NPU, a unit for processing neural networks at speeds faster than what could be done with a general purpose processor alone. The presence of this unit on the device hardware makes possible device side experiences that would have previously required that data be sent to a server for processing. This may also translate into improvements in AR and VR experiences.

The NPU isn’t the only upgrade that comes with the processor. Samsung says the 9820’s new fourth generation custom core delivers a 20% improvement in single core performance or 40% in power efficiency compared to is predecessor. Multicore performance is said to be increased around 15%. The Exynos 9820 also has a video encoder capable of decoding 4K video at up to 150 frames per second in 10-bit color. The processor goes into mass production at the end of this year.

Source: Samsung