AI is the big buzzword right now both in the world of smartphones and the wider tech world. It’s the latest battlefield on which smartphone brands are starting to compete, and it’s something that the rumored Samsung Galaxy S25 line might have an advantage on over the iPhone 16 series.
This is according to a report on South Korean site Ajunews (via WCCFTech), which states that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset expected to power many of 2025’s top Android phones (including probably some Samsung Galaxy S25 models), may support faster RAM than the A18 Pro chipset we’re expecting in the iPhone 16 line.
Specifically, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 might support LPDDR6 (Low-Power Double Data Rate 6) RAM, which isn’t available yet, but the standards for it will reportedly be finalized this year, and it will likely enter mass production this year.
That’s probably too late for the iPhone 16 series that we’re expecting to launch in September. But the site claims that there’s a chance Qualcomm will support it with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, allowing phones from the end of the year or early 2025 to potentially come with this RAM.
The site only says this is a possibility, so we might not see Qualcomm support it until the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (in which case Apple could take the lead, as the A19 Pro, which is likely to land first, will reportedly support LPDDR6 RAM).
Faster and better – especially for AI
But in any case, this RAM should be a lot faster and more efficient than the current generation of RAM, which among other things will benefit on-device AI tasks. In other words, smartphones might be able to do more AI heavy lifting without relying on the cloud or an internet connection.
Right now, lots of the AI features on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S24 and the Google Pixel 8 do require the internet, which means you can’t use these features when there’s no internet, they’re sometimes slow to carry out. And since they mean sending data to the cloud, there can also be privacy concerns.
So being able to handle more AI tasks on device could be a big upgrade, and might also expand the overall capabilities of smartphone AI.
The Samsung Galaxy S24 already has far more AI skills than the iPhone 15, and if the Galaxy S25 has LPDDR6 RAM then it will probably have the iPhone 16 beat for AI skills. But Ajunews sounds uncertain whether this will happen or whether we’ll be waiting until the subsequent generation of chipsets for this feature. Either way, the brand that gets it first could have a real edge.