South Korean firm Samsung has announced a new super-slim memory chip which could power the next generation of its flagship Galaxy smartphones.

Industry watchers are already predicting that the 10 nanometer chip, half the size of the existing 20 nanometer chips, will eventually find its way on the thinnest Galaxy S4 device Samsung has ever made.

In a press release on its Web site, Smasung said, "Current mobile applications show a distinctive trend to slimmer designs and larger display screens, while using advanced multi-core processors and high density (2 Gigabyte) LPDDR2 memory for higher performance, with larger batteries for longer usage on a single charge. This new chip accommodates the increasing size limitations of mobile form factors at the component level."

Samsung's Galaxy S3 was released earlier this year and has helped the company become the biggest smartphone maker in the world - outselling Apple which only recently launched its iPhone 5 handset.

Samsung says the new chip will come with a massive 64GB of memory and represent a 20 percent reduction in size over the conventional embedded memory form.

Embedded memory chips are a key component in smartphones and tablets, allowing users to watch full HD video on their latest mobile devices and provide a better user experience for web browsing, gaming and running rich applications.

Interestingly, Apple has been one of Samsung's biggest customers for memory chips, so there is every chance that the new chips will also find their way on the next iPhone 6 next year.

However, with the intense rivalry between the two companies, Samsung may have some convincing to do if it wants to expand this relationship.

In September, a Taiwanese news service reported that Apple was ready to shift to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to supply chips for its iPhones.

But the new 10nm chips could make it change its mind.

Samsung says that its new chip performs 30 percent faster than its existing technology, has random write speed of 2,000 IOPS (input/output per second) and a random read speed of 5,000 IOPS.

"In addition, sequential read and write speeds are 260 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 50MB/s respectively, which is up to 10 times faster than a class 10 external memory card that reads at 24MB/s and writes at 12MB/s, greatly enhancing the smoothness of multitasking on mobile gadgets," said Samsung.

The new chip is expected to be submitted next year to the Joint Electron Engineering Council for adoption as an industry standard. That could be in time for the Galaxy S4 which is expected to be announced at MWC 2013 or CES 2013, early next year.