The smart phone market, known as the most involution industry, has now extended from the competition of mobile phones to the competition of core chips at the bottom. But why do domestic mobile phone manufacturers compete to develop chips? What's the difference between the chips they developed and the general chips in Qualcomm and MediaTek?
OPPO's core-making plan
As the top five mobile phone manufacturers in the world, OPPO began its layout in the chip field as early as two years ago. Because no matter from the control of the industrial chain, the establishment of core competitiveness, or the prevention of risk control, OPPO realizes that it is very critical to have its own independent chip.
Since 20 19, OPPO has secretly set up a chip development team. Of course, as the core competitive component of mobile phone terminal, not everyone has the ability to develop it. But for OPPO, the arrow is on the string and has to be sent.
As one of the three core technology development projects, OPPO's chip was named "Mariana Project". Beginning this year, the OPPO chip team began to recruit a large number of positions, involving CPU/NPU/GPU, baseband and other directions.
The "Mariana X" released this time is the first achievement of this project. As the first image-specific NPU chip independently designed and developed by OPPO, Mariana MariSilicon X is the world's first mobile independent NPU with 6nm advanced technology. OPPO has achieved four technological breakthroughs in this respect: unprecedented powerful AI computing energy efficiency, industry-leading super HDR, lossless real-time RAW computing, and RGBW Pro that maximizes sensor capabilities. Especially in the aspect of AI computing energy efficiency, Mariana MariSilicon X adopts the new golden architecture concept of DSA (domain specific architecture) for the future AI era, and realizes the "dedicated core", with the highest AI computing power of 18 tops, while the power consumption is controlled at 1 1.6 tops per watt, thus creating a milestone of NPU energy efficiency for mobile phones.
Regarding this chip, Chen Mingyong, founder and CEO of OPPO, said that it is an important research and development achievement of OPPO's "grinding a sword in ten years", which indicates that OPPO has really entered the "deep water area" of research and development, and has taken a key step in the breakthrough of the underlying core technology.
Chen Mingyong said, "Mariana MariSilicon X is only a small step for OPPO to develop its first self-developed chip. In the future, OPPO will continue to invest resources and make self-developed chips in a down-to-earth manner with a team of thousands of people. No matter how many challenges there are ahead, we will persevere and insist that Qingshan will not relax. "
The reason why Chen Mingyong is so determined to make chips is to consider the long-term of OPPO. Chen Mingyong believes that technology companies must solve key problems through key technologies. Without the underlying core technology, there can be no future. The flagship product without the underlying core technology is a castle in the air.
For most domestic mobile phone manufacturers, years of competition have made them understand that whether they have the right to speak chips is the key to maintaining a strong competitive advantage.
Mobile phone manufacturers' dream of making cores
As mentioned above, whether the chip is independent is related to the future development of mobile phone manufacturers. Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers are designing and manufacturing chips independently. At present, Apple, Samsung and Huawei can design and manufacture the main chip SoC. OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi mainly purchase general chips from chip companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, but they are also stepping up the introduction of NPU and ISP chips.
Therefore, all three companies have made articles on the core of image processing. Unlike Xiaomi and vivo, which started from ISP, OPPO started from NPU. Jiang bo said that the combination of algorithm and chip, software and hardware played a decisive role in computing images. When the algorithm and the chip are not completely open and closely coupled with each other, the maximum benefit cannot be exerted. "Only by introducing the AI algorithm into the image can the upper limit of the image experience be greatly improved. Image-specific NPU will become the mainstream direction of mobile phone image development. " Jiang bo said.
However, the goal of these mobile phone manufacturers' self-developed chips is far more than just auxiliary chips. Their goal is to fully master the design and production of the main chip. The successful examples of Huawei and Apple are examples, but it will take time to achieve this goal.
Fundamentally speaking, mobile phone manufacturers have increased their efforts to develop their own chips, with the aim of mastering their future destiny. Whether based on the differentiated competition of products or the cognition of brand market, core construction is the key to build core competitiveness. As Chen Mingyong said, there is no future without the underlying core technology.
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