It looks like Samsung's Galaxy S9 will come with a new feature to put it in direct competition with Apple's iPhone X.Credit: Tom's GuideThe tech giant has nearly completed the development of neural processing units (NPUs) to improve the artificial intelligence features baked into future smartphones, The Korea Herald is reporting, citing sources who claim to have knowledge of the chip's development. The Korea Herald's sources said Samsung is planning to add the artificial intelligence chips to both smartphones and servers. "For mobile devices, Samsung has already reached the technological levels of Apple and Huawei, but will come up with better chips for sure in the second half of the year," the source added. Like other companies, Samsung has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence on the premise that doing so could improve the broader user experience. Apple already offers an AI chip in its iPhone X that the company says can perform "up to 600 billion operations per second."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a bit of a buzzword these days, as companies in the industry make an effort to differentiate their offerings. In 2017, both Apple and Huawei released hardware designed to accelerating AI on their in-house chips -- Apple's A11 Bionic system-on-chip featured the Neural Engine, and Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 970 had a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Now, Samsung has nearly completed development of its own AI chips, according to a report by The Investor. The company is reportedly "almost done" with a hardware line optimized for servers, and it expects to commercialize it in the coming months. On the mobile device side of things, Samsung is said to have matched the technical achievements of Apple and Huawei.