Samsung develops processor chips for AI PCs and is said to have provided samples to HP, Lenovo, etc

Samsung develops processor chips for AI PCs and is said to have provided samples to HP, Lenovo, etc.

The latest news points out that Samsung is providing samples of its dedicated AI processor for next-generation artificial intelligence personal computers (AI PCs) to leading PC manufacturers such as HP and Lenovo.

The chip, codenamed Gaia, was developed by Samsung's system LSI business unit and is designed to offload AI-related workloads from the CPU and GPU to accelerate AI processing. This chip is essentially a neural network processing unit (NPU) and is expected to be manufactured using Samsung Electronics' 4-nanometer process technology.

It's unclear how Gaia differs from other NPUs, or whether it offers a significant performance advantage. However, Gaia may be used to implement Samsung Electronics' next-generation in-memory computing (PIM) technology. Samsung Electronics’ technology path PIM is the integration of storage and calculation.

The core is to integrate the AI computing unit directly into the HBM memory, allowing the memory to perform matrix multiplication and addition without having to transmit the data to the GPU or ASIC. It is a new evolution direction for AI processors, and Samsung Electronics is the most radical implementer of this route.

Simply put, PIM technology is memory-centric and places computing tasks close to the memory. This architecture can offload device-side language models, real-time translation, image generation and other similar tasks from the CPU and GPU. However, the PIM ecosystem is not yet complete, so it has not been widely used.

And if Samsung’s upcoming Gaia NPU can gain support from hardware manufacturers and ecosystem partners, this will promote the realization of Samsung’s next-generation PIM. In addition, the essential differences between independent NPUs and PIMs are quite huge, so it will be extremely challenging to share the same architecture.

However, in terms of supported instructions and data formats, PIM logic can become a subset of NPU, and they can naturally share a common software framework.

It is worth noting that the Gaia chip is said to be developed by Samsung Electronics’ LSI division, which is also the R&D division of Samsung Exynos processors, automotive solutions, connectivity chips, Internet service providers, digital signal processors (DSP), display driver chips and image sensors.

Given the wide range of Samsung's LSI division's business and its strategic importance to the company, Samsung clearly has high hopes for Gaia. (

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