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| Samsung Electronics' HBM-PIM chips / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics is extending its technology leadership in the memory chip sector, as the chip titan has unveiled new memory chips featuring artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the company said Tuesday.
The company unveiled and introduced how the new products are used at Hot Chips, an annual semiconductor industry conference for promoting new technology. The company said it has developed high bandwidth memory (HBM) integrated with AI processing power, called HBM-PIM, which will be used for servers in data centers.
Samsung said that the next-generation chips help central processing units (CPUs) process data much faster, as the AI processor-embedded memory chips are able to perform data operations normally handled by CPUs.
In February, Samsung already introduced the chip industry's first HBM-PIM chips, saying that they are test-running the products to enhance high-speed data processing in supercomputers and other applications.
Since then, the HBM-PIM has been tested in U.S. semiconductor firm Xilinx's AI accelerator, called Virtex UltraScale+. The results were satisfactory, as the memory chips boosted system performance 2.5 times, while reducing energy consumption by more than 60 percent.
"HBM-PIM is the industry's first AI-tailored memory solution being tested in customer AI-accelerator systems, demonstrating tremendous commercial potential," Kim Nam-sung, senior vice president of Samsung said.
The executive added that its HBM-PIM can be utilized in various applications such as supercomputers, data centers and other AI applications that require faster data processing.
The German tech company, SAP, is also said to be conducting tests of Samsung's memory chips in its database management system, SAP HANA. Oliver Rebholz, head of HANA core research & innovation at SAP said that they expect significant performance improvements and higher energy efficiency when using the new memory chips.
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