New chip hints Galaxy S5 will have 4GB RAM, 4K screen

Samsung has unveiled a new chip that could give its next flagship handset superpowers. The South Korean company has lifted the lid on the first 8-gigabit (1GB) low-power DDR4 memory chip, snappily called the LPDDR4. Basically, shove this in a device, and you could be walking around with 4GB of RAM in your pocket.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 boasts 3GB of RAM, and as anyone who's used it will tell you, it's certainly no slouch on the performance side. So 4GB would be mind-meltingly fast.

Samsung unveiled the chip on its Samsung Tomorrow site. It promises 50 per cent faster performance than existing chips, while using 40 per cent less power. Which should hopefully mean we see longer battery lives from the next generation of mobiles.

The chip is intended to focus on the "premium mobile market", Samsung says, including "large screen UHD smart phones, tablets and ultra-slim notebooks". UHD is also known as 4K, which has four times as many pixels as HD. So reading between the lines, Samsung's Galaxy S5 -- which is expected to launch at Mobile World Congress in February -- could come with a 4K screen.

Recently it was rumoured that Samsung would fit a 560ppi display to the Galaxy S5. Either way, it looks like the next flagship could have a mighty hi-res screen.

The S5 is also rumoured to have an eye scanner, so you can unlock it just by looking at it. How cool would that be? It would make the iPhone 5S's fingerprint scanner look positively stone age.

Would you like 4GB of RAM in your smart phone? How much is too much? What about a 4K screen? Would it be wasted at that size? And what else would you like to see from the Galaxy S5? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook page.