As it has done with previous versions of the Galaxy flagship, Samsung will release the Galaxy S9 and S9+ with different processors depending on region. The US variants will apparently get Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 processor, while versions released elsewhere will get Samsung's own Exynos 9810 chip.

New reports suggest that Samsung will integrate its own neural engine, responsible for AI tasks, into the Exynos processor, as Qualcomm already has a neural engine of its own with the Snapdragon processor.

The neural engine is likely being developed following Samsung's investment in Chinese DeePhi Tech, which specialises in artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms. DeePhi Tech already has its own Deep Neural Network Developer Kit, which would be capable of giving the Galaxy S9 and S9+ instant voice recognition, neural language processing and other recognition tasks.

It's not entirely clear exactly what Samsung will use its own neural engine for, although there have already been rumours to suggest the Galaxy S9 will have a camera with depth-sensing capabilities of its own, possibly for facial recognition.

Regardless of its function, having the neural engine coprocessor will free up some of the everyday responsibilities from the main processing unit, which should result in better performance and battery life.

Samsung's move to create its own neural engine is more than likely in response to Apple developing its own A11 Bionic chipset for the iPhone X, to be used for features such as Face ID and Animoji, and Google developing the Pixel Visual Core which is used for improved camera processing technology.