By Rha Hae-sung, Lee Min-hyung
Korea is shying away from research in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered application processors, with only a few research and industry-wise players jumping into the emerging tech area.
This is in contrast to other tech powerhouses in countries such as the United States and China whose representative AI chip players are Apple and Huawei.
According to Counterpoint Research data, the AI chip market for smartphones has been rapidly rising this year. By 2020, more than 35 percent of all smartphones will be equipped with AI chips, the market researcher said Friday.
It said that once system on chips (SoC) come with AI capabilities, this will bring a huge technological leap forward, allowing smartphones to do natural language processing, real-time translation and offer user-oriented services.
In the smartphone market, Apple has been a leading AI chipset producer. It showcased its flagship product, the iPhone 8, and X with its AI processor, the A11 Bionic. The A11 includes neural network hardware, named “Neural Engine” by Apple, performing up to 600 billion operations a second. Neural Engine enables face identification, Animoji and other machine-learning tasks.
Creeping closer to Apple’s AI research, Huawei has introduced its AI chipset, “Kirin 970,” with its premium smartphone, the Mate 10. The handset is capable of recognizing 2,500 images a minute and automatically optimizes its camera setting depending on the subject of the photo.
Intel, which lost its title to Samsung Electronics as the world’s largest chipmaker by revenue, is also seeking to regain its luster by launching new AI chips. The company recently unveiled a plan to join with Facebook to ship chips dedicated to processing AI projects no later than this year.
Tesla has reportedly teamed up with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturer, to develop AI chips for use in self-driving cars.
But Korean players remain passive in jumping into the new revenue area. To date, no official announcement has been made here over the AI chipsets.
“Experimenting with something new is widely accepted in the society in such countries as the U.S. and China, but things are different in Korea,” a tech industry source said. In Korea, several unnecessary regulations drive down the appetite for people to tap into the relatively new area - such as AI chips, he said.
“To aggressively jump into such new tech areas, the government should lift outdated sanctions first,” the source said. “This will encourage more people and companies to continue experimenting in new areas.”