Smartphones May Soon Be Equipped With ‘Smart’ RAM

Many smartphones use Machine learning today, and this intelligence helps with everything from system performance and translation to voice command and camera quality. Samsung has announced that it will incorporate a similar idea into its smartphone’s RAM modules. 

The company announced that a memory processing technology called (what it calls P.I.M short for Processing-In-Memory) will be incorporated into the RAM of its smartphones. This is in addition to the use of the technology in high bandwidth memory and DRAM modules. 

Having noted in the news update, the LPDDR5-PIM mobile memory technology can provide users with independent AI capabilities without data center connectivity. Samsung says simulation tests confirmed that the LPDDR5-PIM can double the smartphone’s performance while reducing energy usage by over 60% when used in applications such as voice recognition, translation, and chatbot (sic). 

At first glance, this sounds like a potentially very useful feature to represent machine learning faster and more efficiently, but there are many questions about the technology. 

First of all, it is unclear if the PIM is a real processor built into the RAM module itself, or a bunch of optimisations and algorithms. If this is actually a chip, I’m wondering if third-party developers can access it for their own use. 

It is also not clear how powerful this Tech will be and whether it can handle more complex tasks like image processing and computer vision. After all, many smartphones have chipsets that can handle more than just complex machine learning tasks, and almost every large device has dedicated AI chips. Nonetheless, a RAM-enabled PIM with a significant amount of memory could theoretically be ideal for a low-cost phone, allowing OEMs to do the heavy lifting with cheaper silicon and smart RAM. 

Samsung is yet to announce when we will see this RAM in smartphones, although PIM technology standardisation is expected to be completed in the first half of 2022. Anyway, we have asked the company to share more information on the LPDDR5 PIM technology and we will update this article when they contact us.