How much do you know about the story of chip vs. mobile phone chip?

The A7 processor used in iPhone 5s is the first 64-bit system chip for smart phones. Mobile phone processor chips are increasingly becoming a high-performance center, providing superior capabilities and trying to control power consumption. You can't see it without opening it, but its influence is everywhere ... Besides these superficial figures, such as runaway, quad-core, 1.5Ghz, do you want to know more stories about mobile phone chips-why does ARM occupy 90% of the design share in this market? Why are Qualcomm's chips expensive and the first in the market? All right, let's start telling stories. Of course, this is more like a war. Overture: This Jianghu is actually orderly. There will be many roles in the future, and all forces in the field of smart phone chips also have Jianghu seats. Unlike the story set in the legendary swordsman, the chip field, the closer to the bottom, the higher the status (but not necessarily the most profitable). It is intuitive to understand that the most basic mobile phone chip should be a solid small square. Inside the small square, there is the brightest crystallization of human wisdom. In order for the cube to perform its tasks, it needs to use a language it can understand, that is, an instruction set. The small cube listens to it, so it is the best. But there are usually two best stories, otherwise the peak of Jianghu will be too lonely. Instruction sets are also divided into two camps, complex (CISC) and simplified (RISC). This part seems a bit abstruse, because there are English abbreviations. In fact, we don't have to pay attention to it. We continue to understand in a perceptual way-the complexity and the simplification. You can write a separate book about the competition history between complex instruction sets and simplified instruction sets. Let's skip a lot of things that have nothing to do with today and simply make a summary introduction. The representative of today's complex instruction set is Intel's x86 system. Because of its complexity, it can do many advanced commands, but its execution efficiency is low and it is difficult to control power consumption. The reduced instruction set is to control the number of instructions as much as possible, exclude those instructions with low utilization rate, and even fix the instruction length, so it has high efficiency and low power consumption. But it needs to be divided when dealing with long instructions. Its representative is ARM. Complex instruction sets are more used in PCs and servers, which is Intel's main battlefield; The simplified instruction set is more in micro-systems such as mobile phones, which is the world of ARM. Of course, today, the two camps are learning from each other and constantly evolving. Therefore, ARM is the closest person to Xiaofang in smart phones, and it is the leader, and both Intel and MIPS are eyeing this position. Camp: the road to leadership brought by authorization is above the instruction set, not the architecture. It is like a design drawing, telling the engineering team how to build a building called a mobile phone processor. ARM is basically a painter. But 360 lines, each line is a champion. Painting the picture to the extreme is also invincible in the world. With the continuous efforts of reducing the instruction set camp, ARM has finally become a design master in the low-power and high-efficiency processor market. According to the latest market estimate, the proportion of processors with ARM architecture in smartphones may reach 90%. Even more frightening is that in addition to smart phone chips, ARM also provides chip design solutions for hundreds of millions of game consoles, home appliances, and even bank cards, mobile phone cards, and bus cards. In 20 1 1 year, ARM's customers delivered 7.9 billion processors, accounting for 95% of smart phones, 90% of hard disks, 40% of digital TVs and set-top boxes, 15% of single-chip computers and 20% of the mobile computer market. In 20 12, the total shipment data of chips authorized by ARM architecture reached 8.7 billion. One thing needs special attention: ARM only designs processors, and does not produce them. Therefore, its 90% share in the smartphone market is achieved through chip solution providers, such as Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and MediaTek. ARM provides its own chip design of each generation to its partners in the form of intellectual property rights authorization, and everyone carries out secondary development according to their own needs, and finally becomes a commercial product. ARM is detached in the industry, but it doesn't earn much. In 20 12 years, ARM's total income was $9130,000, which was far lower than its small partners and even less than Qualcomm's monthly income. But ARM is still the most important one in the whole industry. Control the source market and patented technology of smart phone chip design through authorization. For different customers, ARM has also launched a variety of authorized package services very intimately. According to statistics, ARM currently has nearly 1000 valid licenses from more than 300 customers, and the shipment of processors based on these licenses has exceeded 30 billion.