Your smartphone might get ‘smart’ RAM soon
- Samsung has announced LPDDR5 PIM RAM.
- This is essentially “smart” RAM that has AI capabilities.
- Samsung says this technology can boost performance while using less power.
Machine learning is used in many smartphones today and helps with everything from system performance and translations to voice commands and camera quality. Now Samsung has announced that it will bring similar smarts into its RAM modules for smartphones.
The company announced that its Processing-in-Memory (PIM) technology is making its way into the memory of smartphones. This is in addition to the technical landing with DRAM modules and high bandwidth memories.
“Samsung’s LPDDR5 PIM mobile storage technology can provide independent AI capabilities without data center connectivity,” the company said in a press release. “Simulation tests have shown that the LPDDR5-PIM can more than double performance while reducing energy consumption by over 60% when used in applications such as speech recognition, translation and chatbot (sic).”
Why would you want smart RAM?
At first glance, this sounds like a pretty handy feature that may result in faster and more efficient machine learning performance, but we have a lot of questions about technology.
For starters, it’s unclear whether PIM takes the form of an actual processor attached to the RAM module itself, or whether it is simply a series of optimizations and algorithms. If it is indeed a real chip, we wonder if third-party developers can access it for their own needs.
It’s also unclear how powerful this technology is and whether it can handle more advanced tasks like image processing and computer vision. After all, many smartphones have chipsets that are more than capable of performing advanced machine learning tasks, and virtually all flagship devices have dedicated AI chips as well. But PIM-enabled RAM with a fair amount of grunt could theoretically be ideal for budget phones, so OEMs might go with cheaper silicon and let the “smart” RAM do some of the heavy lifting.
After all, Samsung hasn’t revealed when we’ll actually see this RAM in smartphones, although the goal is to complete standardization of PIM technology in the first half of 2022.
In any case, we have asked Samsung for more details on LPDDR5 PIM technology and will update this article when it reaches us.
Source link
