Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S9 is highly expected to be powered by two processors in various markets. While Qualcomm's recently announced Snapdragon 845 chip is likely to be featured in the North American, South American and Chinese variants of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+, Samsung's latest Exynos processor will power the upcoming handsets in other markets.
The new high-end Exynos processor is widely rumoured to be called the Exynos 9810, and is going to be unveiled by the South Korean tech giant on January 4.
Samsung teased the next-generation Exynos processor on its official Samsung Exynos Twitter account on Thursday, with an interesting tagline saying that the processor "goes beyond a component."
While the tweet didn't provide further details about the processor, the intriguing tagline has now been speculated to be a hint to possible advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of the new Exynos processor.
Discover #TheNextExynos that goes beyond a component. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/542sWnQ7EZ
— Samsung Exynos (@SamsungExynos) December 28, 2017
The Korea Herald reported in September that Samsung was developing new chips that might have dedicated cores for AI applications on devices, including smartphones and connected home appliances.
"(Samsung) is in the middle of developing several types of chips that will be capable of processing massive data from AI applications on devices, eliminating the need to communicate with cloud servers," an industry source told the publication at that time.
Advanced AI capabilities on the Samsung Galaxy S9 will indeed be a significant enhancement to the smartphone series as many rival manufacturers have already implemented similar features on their flagship offerings.
Apple's recently-launched iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X are powered by the new A11 Bionic SoC that comes with a "Neural Engine" that helps the phones with machine learning tasks.
China's Huawei, currently the world's third largest smartphone vendor, also has announced that will release its Mate 10 smartphones with the new Kirin 970 chipset which is equipped with a neural processing unit.
As for the Galaxy S9, Samsung is likely to unveil the device at the Mobile World Congress in February. The device's release, on the other hand, is expected to take place sometime in March.
Rumours have it that the Samsung Galaxy S9 could come with a 5.8-inch QHD+ Super AMOLED screen and a 3,100 mAh battery while the Galaxy S9+ will feature a similar display with an increased size of 6.2 inches and a slightly larger 3,600 mAh battery.
Other speculated specs of the Galaxy S9 include 4 or 6GB of RAM, 64 or 128GB of internal storage, a 12MP rear camera with f/2.4 aperture, 8MP front-facing camera, iris scanner and a rear fingerprint sensor.
