Qualcomm and MediaTek's "core" war upgraded, Samsung was injured

This article was original by Sutoo123

Author / Qiao Zhibin

Under the hopes, Samsung finally paid a "price" for his backward craftsmanship.

Today, MediaTek released the Tiantian 9000+ chip. As the flagship chip launched by MediaTek to the mobile terminal this year-the iterative product of the Tianye 9000 series, the frequency of the Tianyi 9000+ Cortex-X2 nuclear nucleus has been increased from the 3.05GHz of Tianzhang 9000 to 3.2GHz. About 10%.

This can not help but make people contact on May 20th. Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 8+Gen1 processor. Although it is only the "semi -generation" upgrade from the code, the process process of the Snapdragon 8+Gen1 not only changed to TSMC The 4nm process, and the main frequency of the A510 small core, the A710 large core, and the X2 large core cores increased by 0.2GHz, 0.25GHz, and 0.2GHz, respectively. The 4nm energy efficiency ratio has sufficient confidence.

Obviously, the launch of the Tianye 9000+ is obviously to cope with the theoretical performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+Gen1.

Faced with the wrestling of Qualcomm and MediaTek's flagship mobile SOC, what kind of change will the flagship mobile phone market usher in the second half of this year? With Qualcomm's turn to TSMC, what is Samsung? Let us analyze it slowly.

Snapdragon 8+Gen1 Qualcomm Qualcomm "Fire Captain" in the second half of the year

Affected by the market inertia, in the first half of this year's Android mobile phone market, the flagship model still mainly adopts the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8GEN1 processor. However, shortly after the model equipped with the Snapdragon 8GEN1 processor, because of the bad performance, the heating situation with the previous Snapdragon 888 was called "Fire Dragon" by netizens.

The reason why the reason why the Snapdragon 8GEN1 is bad performance is two main reasons: on the one hand, the ARMV9 architecture used by the Snapdragon 8GEN1, as a large core A710 model, as the only core of 32 -bit APP, The energy ratio is low in design.

Another point is the backwardness of Samsung's chip technology. Although the Samsung 4nm process technology adopted by Snapdragon 8 is similar to MediaTek 4nm in terms of name, from the actual effect, smaller circuit spacing can indeed allow limited space content to be more transistor and make the chip integration even more layer. The number of crystals in the building allows this processor to have a higher theoretical limit performance. However, compared to TSMC 4nm technology, the worse leakage rate of Samsung 4nm technology not only fails to achieve the expected energy saving effect of the advanced process process, but also the low -quality rate of good products, which also makes this energy -effective processor. There is no advantage at all.

Among the actual models, not only the price of flagship models remains high, but also in terms of performance, it is also forced to optimize: either to increase temperature control and sacrifice the limit of the mobile phone; or give the body to the fuselage; Internal increased active heat dissipation components, significantly increased the weight and thickness of the mobile phone.

Although the mobile phone manufacturer's strength "dragon taming", the "dragon" itself is too poor, and the unsatisfactory experience has also affected the sales of the Snapdragon 8GEN1 flagship model. The price reduction ranges from 500-1500 yuan, low-cost clearance Snapdragon 8GEN1 model.

Therefore, shortly after the Snapdragon 8 was launched, he began to contact TSMC, hoping to use the Snapdragon 8+Gen1 to reverse this decline in the second half of the year.

Judging from the performance of the Snapdragon 8+GEN1 (Qualcomm Reference Design) released by Qualcomm recently, after switching to TSMC 4nm process process, the energy efficiency does improve, but the actual performance is just the same as the previous engineering prototype of Tianji 9000. Essence This means that although Qualcomm threw off the burden of backward crafts through replacement of foundries, but the United States flagship chip with the same architecture still could not recover the leading advantage.

At least, the Snapdragon 8+Gen1 is no longer the one that is "backward" this time.

"Wolong Phoenix" in the field of Tianyi 9000+ mobile phones

The shift of the camera to MediaTek, the release of the 9000 chip this year, has become the expectation of many users of many "bitter fire dragons", which made MediaTek impact the high -end to see hope again.

In the past years of the flagship mobile SOC market, Qualcomm's unique situation, for the MediaTek of "challengers", "is a victory", not to mention that the Tianye 9000 chip is more energy efficient than the Snapdragon 8Gen1. Outstanding.

The better energy efficiency performance of the Tianyi 9000 also allows OPPO Find X5 Pro, Vivo X80 series, Redmi K50 Pro and other models to use the Tianji 9000 as the flagship chip. According to the industrial chain, more manufacturers will plan to launch in the second half of the year will launch launch Tianji 9000+/Tianye 9000 model.

However, although the Tianye 9000 brings a better energy -efficiency ratio, in terms of performance and power consumption, MediaTek and Qualcomm have also received a common opponent -Apple's A series processor market crowded. Fortunately, Apple has publicly stated that it will not be sold to third parties. Therefore, in the Android camp, MediaTek's competitors are still mainly the Qualcomm. Qualcomm MediaTek is the most injured in Samsung

On one side is Qualcomm's burden of the past, which can fight with MediaTek positively; on the other hand, MediaTek relies on TSMC's more advanced craftsmanship and ARMV9 new architecture to impact the high -end market and resist Qualcomm in the flagship mobile chip market. The TSMC behind has received a large number of orders, becoming the biggest winner behind. And this time, Samsung, the chip foundry, has become the largest loser.

According to TrendForce data, in the first quarter of 2022, among the TOP10 companies in the global wafer agency factory, Samsung is the only foundry factory that has a negative growth in the TV and smartphone markets. In contrast, TSMC ranked first with a revenue of US $ 17.5 billion, an increase of 11.3%month -on -month.

The reason why Samsung has shrunk is essentially the consequence of technology backward.

As early as the Snapdragon 835 and 845 two generations of chips, Qualcomm used Samsung as a chip foundry. At that time, the Samsung 10nm process was still in the industry. Qualcomm selected the two foundries of Samsung and TSMC in the chip foundry. Because of the multi -supplier's strategy, it can not only reduce the supply risk brought by a single supplier, but also have more bargaining rights in front of the supplier.

After entering 7nm, Samsung's process progress began to open the gap with TSMC, which also allowed Qualcomm to hand over the foundry of the Snapdragon 865 chip to TSMC, not Samsung.

However, the good times did not last long. At the end of 2020, in the Snapdragon 888 generation, because most TSMC's 5nm production capacity was consumed by Apple's A14 processor and M1 processor, Qualcomm had to distribute orders to Samsung. The backwardness of the Samsung 5nm process has created the Snapdragon 888/888+energy efficiency ratio compared to the previous Snapdragon 865 and does not rise and fall, so that Qualcomm has to launch the "official overclocking version" Snapdragon 870 rescue field.

It can be seen that for Qualcomm, giving up Samsung and returning to TSMC seems to be a matter of course.

In addition, Samsung's own Exynos series chips are even thinner. As the Exynos 2200 processor developed by Samsung and AMD, the performance is only 7%higher than the EXynos 2100, and there is a 30%gap compared to the Snapdragon 8GEN1. Not only that, due to the lack of patent accumulation in the field of 4G and 5G communication, Samsung faces the overseas market and mostly uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 chip, and the models equipped with their own Exynos processors are mainly sold locally in South Korea.

As Samsung's own processor is already expanding with Qualcomm and MediaTek, it also means that Samsung Semiconductor will not only lose the large single of the mobile chip, but in the smartphone business, you must also buy the flagship phone chip from TSMC. Undoubted

On the battlefield of the science and technology industry, those who decide to win or lose will eventually return to the accumulation of technology, channels, and supply chains for many years. People with deep accumulation will always be better. Whether Samsung can reverse the slump in the field of chip foundry today depends on whether it can make great progress in the next generation model. Prior to this, waiting for Samsung may be the fate of decline in the trend.

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