Samsung’s new memory chips that just went into mass production for “next-gen flagship” smartphones are designed to address battery drain through improved efficiency. Thin phones are nice and all, but longer battery life in high-end smartphones is even better.

Specifically, the second-generation 10nm (1y-nm) class 16Gb LPDDR4X (Low Power, Double Data Rate, 4X) Mobile DRAM chip achieves the current 4,266 Mbps data rate seen in flagship smartphones, but does so with a power decrease that’s up to 10 percent.

Things get even more interesting when Samsung combines the chips, creating an 8GB LPDDR4X mobile DRAM package by using four of the 10nm-class 16Gb LPDDR4X DRAM chips (16Gb=2GB). That might look like a lot of inscrutable text, but the result is a package that’s more energy efficient overall and 20 percent slimmer than the current design.

The new energy-efficient chip “should first hit the market late this year or the first part of 2019,” said Sewon Chun, senior vice president of memory sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics. This move is a major change in Samsung’s chip lineup because it involves a 70 percent expansion in production. The new memory chips should arrive just in time for the new wave of Galaxy flagships — but seemingly not the Note 9 coming later this month.