In 2020, several flagship smartphones will see significant improvements in both speed and battery life. It will come not from Qualcomm's new Snapdragon or Apple Bionic processors, but from a new type of memory that these devices will feature: LPDDR5 RAM.

As posted on the Chinese social network Weibo and reported by Gizmochina, LPDDR5 RAM will reach consumers' hands with the Xiaomi Mi 10 and MI 10 Pro, perhaps as early as this month:

Xiaomi has announced that the Wuhan Corona is set to unveil its new Mi 10 line at a streaming event on Thursday, February 13, which will not be open to the public due to a virus. The company has confirmed that the flagship model will use LPDDR5, touting its "faster performance and lower power consumption" benefits.

L(ow)P(ow)DDR5 is typically 2x faster than LPDDR4 and 20% faster than LPDDR4X, with 50% faster read speeds. It is also more energy efficient than previous standards, consuming 20% less power.

For you, this means faster phones and more features. In general, the system will run much faster. According to Micron, this RAM can run more than 100 apps simultaneously without breaking a sweat.

Power-hungry apps like high-performance gaming and 4K/8K video editing will be faster and smoother; LPDDR5 will also enable complex augmented reality games that use a lot of RAM bandwidth. Artificial intelligence processing, which requires access to large amounts of RAM using the highest possible bandwidth, will also benefit from this new memory chip.

More importantly, according to Micron, this type of RAM is a requirement for image processing above 100 MP. And we know that both the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and Galaxy S20 Ultra will feature 108MP sensors.

As for battery life, according to Micron, it can be extended by 5-10% by using LPDDR5 RAM.

After earlier LPDDR5 RAM rumors in the S10 failed to materialize, the Samsung Galaxy S20 is said to feature 12GB of low-power, high-speed memory chips across the line - at least according to Samsung's master leakster Ice Universe.

With no clear date for when these two phones will be in consumers' hands, whether Xiaomi or Samsung's "first!" s claim to the title remains to be seen; Micron claims to have just started mass production of "the world's first low-power LPDDR5 DRAM chip," while the rumor is that the Samsung Galaxy S20 will probably start shipping by March 6.

We will know for sure next week when both Samsung and Xiaomi hold their respective flagship events.