Financial Services Association, April 17 (Editor Shi Zhengcheng) As the battleground of artificial intelligence applications gradually penetrates from large models on the web to “AI PCs” and “AI phones,” a war over high-speed mobile memory has begun.

memory chip giant$Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (SSNLF.US)$An announcement was issued on Wednesday stating that the company has developed the “fastest in the industry” LPDDR5X memory chip, which can reach 10.7 Gbps, and has also updated industry standards in terms of memory capacity and energy consumption.

Large-scale production of this “industry's fastest” LPDDR5X memory will begin in the second half of this year.

Samsung said it has achieved the “smallest size” in existing LPDDR products by utilizing a 12-nanometer node process. Compared with the previous generation, the latest product has increased performance and capacity by more than 25% and 30%, respectively. At the same time, the maximum capacity of a single package has been raised to 32GB, making it suitable for mobile devices in the AI era that require high performance, high capacity, and low power consumption memory.

The memory chip also uses special energy-saving technology, such as adjusting power according to the workload and expanding the frequency band for low power consumption modes. All in all, the new product is 25% more effective than the previous generation.

Yongcheol Bae, executive vice president and head of memory product planning at Samsung Electronics, explained that with the increase in demand for low-power and high-performance storage, it is expected that the main application scenarios of LPDDR memory will expand from mobile devices to the fields of personal computers, accelerators, servers, and automobiles. Samsung will cooperate with customers to provide optimized products for the upcoming era of airborne AI.

coincidence? Micron just announced the progress of similar products three days ago

Coincidentally, another giant in the field of memory chips$Micron Technology (MU.US)$Technology just boasted in an announcement on the 14th of this month that its products have been providing the “highest bandwidth and lowest power consumption” memory chips to the smartphone industry.

Micron announced that by optimizing the 1ß node of the LPDDR5X memory, power consumption was further reduced by 4% while maintaining 9.6Gbps speed.

Micron said, for example, the iPhone 15 Pro,$Apple (AAPL.US)$It is claimed to provide 23 hours of video playback battery life. If every component in the phone can reduce power consumption by 4%, this means that the user's video playback battery life can be increased to 24 hours.

“AI phones” are rapidly entering a period of explosion

With Samsung releasing the S24 flagship phone equipped with a range of AI features near Apple's headquarters at the beginning of this year, the market will also call 2024 “the first year of AI phones.” This is also the background for memory giants to collectively work on mobile high-bandwidth memory chips.

According to a report by industry research firm Counterpoint, cumulative global shipments of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) phones are expected to reach 1 billion units during the 2024-2027 period. The market share of such AI phones will also increase from 5% in 2023 to 40%.

Counterpoint expects shipments of GenAI phones to exceed 100 million units in 2024 and reach 522 million units in 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 83%.

(Source: Counterpoint)

Counterpoint's forecast also has a huge amount of uncertainty—no Apple. Counterpoint predicts that Qualcomm will account for 80% of GenAI phones in the next two years, while MediaTek will catch up with the Tianji 9300. In terms of mobile phone manufacturers, Samsung will account for half of the share, followed by domestic manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Vivo, Honor, and OPPO.

However, according to new information from the well-known tech tipster Gulman last week, Apple will launch an M4 chip this year that emphasizes AI capabilities, and Mac computers equipped with this chip will be on the market as soon as the end of the year. It's hard to imagine that in a context where Mac computers emphasize AI, the iPhone, which accounts for half of the company's revenue, is unlikely to “have nothing to do with AI.”

According to the schedule, Apple will hold an annual developer conference on June 10, and the market generally expects that Apple's iOS ecosystem will usher in a series of AI features at that time.

Editor/jayden