Annual 5G high-end chip showdown! Qualcomm's first 4nm chip, 8Gen1, competes with Dimensity 9000. Who is the return of the king?
5G
Time flies! 2021 is coming to an end, and the 5G chip war has entered a period of intense outbreak in the past week. On November 19, the chip manufacturer MediaTek released the 5G flagship chip Dimensity 9000 first, starting the chip battle for high-end flagship mobile phones. On November 30, during the 2021 Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm Technologies launched a new top 5G mobile platform-a new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform. Back on September 15th, Apple released a new 5G flagship iPhone13 series equipped with A15 chips, using 5nm process, integrated 15 billion transistors, the 5G high-end chip market is making a comeback.
Picture: Electronic enthusiasts tabulated based on public information
Statistics show that in the past October, with the strong support of the iPhone 13 series, Apple returned to the top spot in the Chinese market, and at the same time became the single-product sales champion during Double Eleven this year with sales of 1.93 million units. Recently, the well-known research organization Countpoint announced the latest situation of the global mobile phone market in the third quarter. Samsung shipped 69.3 million units, ranking first in the world, with a market share of 20%. Apple shipped 48 million mobile phones, an increase of 15% year-on-year, ranking second with a global market share of 14%. Due to the shortage of chips, Xiaomi’s mobile phone shipments fell 15% month-on-month and its market share was 13%.
Recently, Xiaomi Group President Wang Xiang said at the Q3 financial report that Xiaomi’s global market share was overtaken by Apple because the iPhone 13 was too strong. The A15 bionic chip on the iPhone 13 is indispensable. On the one hand, Apple’s iPhone 13 does not increase the price. On the other hand, the price of the 5G flagship mobile phone in the Android camp is rising, and the high-end experience has yet to be broken. Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 vs. MediaTek Dimensity 9000, who can break the Android camp’s 5G flagship phone? From mobile photography and video streaming to the popular AI-related technologies of Metaverse, what evolution and competition have the two 5G flagship mobile phone chips made? The author analyzes in detail for you.
MediaTek and Qualcomm smashed high-end chips, who can win with 4nm process chips?
According to the Strategy Analytics research report, in the second quarter of 2021, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple accounted for the top three in the global smartphone application processor market revenue, with shares of 36%, 29%, and 21%, respectively. MediaTek has been continuously growing in the low-end 5G mobile phone chip market. Can this time rely on Dimensity 9000 to counterattack in the high-end chip market?
Looking back at the 5G high-end mobile phone market from last year to this year, Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 has almost become the standard for flagship mobile phones of manufacturers in the Android camp. However, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 was manufactured by Samsung last year, and was affected by the yield of Samsung’s foundry chips. The mobile phone chips had overheating problems, which prevented their full performance.
In September of this year, the A15 chip using TSMC's 5nm process was born. The CPU of the Apple A15 chip is 50% higher than the competition, and the performance of the 4-core GPU is 30% higher than the competition. On November 30, the release of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen1 using 4nm process technology was obviously also a benchmark against Apple, achieving a significant leap in the performance of Snapdragon 888.
It is reported that the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is built with Samsung’s 4nm process and uses ARM v9 architecture chips. The CPU is an 8-core 3.0GHz Kryo based on Cortex-X2+A710+A510, which improves performance by 20%, reduces energy consumption by up to 30%, and GPU performance Increased by 30%, reduced energy consumption by 25%, increased AI computing performance by 4 times, supported ray tracing, supported 8K 30P HDR video recording, integrated Leica filters, etc.
On November 19, MediaTek first released the Dimensity 9000. This chip uses TSMC’s 4nm process. Before that, MediaTek and TSMC have had a close relationship. They have cooperated with the high-end Dimensity 1000 and mid-range Dimensity 800 series. Good response from the market. From a process point of view, TSMC’s foundry 4nm process seems to be better than Samsung’s 4nm chip.
The author compares the two chips and finds that there are similarities and differences between the two. Both products use 8-core architecture, and MediaTek shows certain advantages in CPU frequency and GPU enhancement. In terms of CPU, MediaTek Dimensity 9000 adopts the latest Arm v9 architecture, including 1 Cortex-X2 super core with a main frequency of 3.05GHz, 3 large A710 cores with a main frequency of 2.85GHz, and 4 small A510 cores. Official test data shows that the CPU performance of this chip is 35% higher than the previous generation, and the energy consumption ratio is increased by 37%. In addition, in terms of GPU, Dimensity 9000 debuted Mali-G710 ten-core GPU, which is 30% higher than the previous generation Mali-G78, and power consumption is reduced by 35%. Support ray tracing.
Figure: MediaTek Dimensity 9000 running points provided by MediaTek
After the release of Dimensity 9000, Antutu said that it found a running score of MediaTek Dimensity 9000 in the background, with a total score of 1007396. Netizens thought this might be the best flagship Soc chip of MediaTek. On Weibo, well-known bloggers revealed that the realme running with the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chip reached 1025215 points, which is about 17,819 points ahead of Dimensity 9000, and the overall performance wins.
Figure: Qualcomm 8Gen1 performance introduction. Electronic enthusiast shooting
Qualcomm has an advantage in the field of 5G transmission, which is reflected in the dual-band support of the Qualcomm 8Gen1 platform. Qualcomm announced that the integrated X65 baseband Snapdragon 8 Gen1 supports 5G and supports millimeter wave frequency bands and Sub 6GHz frequency bands, with a maximum downlink rate of 10Gbps and a maximum uplink rate of 3.5Gbps. Support 8K 30P HDR video recording, WiFi 6E, LPDDR5 and Bluetooth 5.2.
In contrast, Dimensity 9000 supports the latest 3GPP R16 standard, and currently only supports Sub 6GHz in terms of frequency bands, and does not support millimeter waves. In terms of 5G performance, Dimensity 9000 is equipped with an M80 baseband based on 3GPP R16, supports 300MHz 3-fold carrier aggregation downlink, and a download rate of up to 7Gbps. Dimensity 9000 supports Bluetooth 5.3, WiFi 6E 2X2 MIMO and the latest Bluetooth LE Audio.
The 5nm process Snapdragon 888 used to have a serious fever. How can the new generation of Snapdragon 8Gen1 chips solve this pain point? Ziad Asghar, vice president of product management at Qualcomm Technologies, told reporters that, first of all, the Snapdragon 8Gen1 chip has achieved a 25% energy efficiency improvement in graphics processing, and a 30% improvement in the overall energy efficiency of the CPU, as well as in AI. With a 1.7 times energy efficiency improvement, the starting point for these technologies in terms of energy efficiency improvement is to further control power consumption.
Regarding the 4nm chip process, Ziad Asghar believes that it mainly depends on three factors: the first is the process and transistors; the second is the quality of the IP, and the third is the architecture. The Snapdragon 8Gen1 chip performs well in the latter two. "Although the manufacturing process is very important now, the comprehensive quality of the three aspects can provide consumers with an excellent 5G flagship experience." Ziad Asghar emphasized.
From mobile photography, video streaming to Metaverse, what are Qualcomm and MediaTek's head-on confrontations on 5G high-end chips?
Industry experts told reporters that consumers are now very savvy, and they value the application experience brought by 5G mobile phones when changing phones. The improvement of mobile photography, the video application experience and game experience driven by Douyin, consumers not only watch videos, but also need to produce high-definition short videos and distribute videos. This requires flagship mobile phones to have high computing power, high memory and large capacity. bandwidth. There is also AI as the underlying technology that drives the meta-universe, and its ability to improve will also bring further changes in the experience.
Ziad Asghar, vice president of product management at Qualcomm Technologies, said: “Advanced computational photography and computer vision technologies will enable depth perception, hand/eyeball/posture tracking and tools to capture and perceive the most realistic meta-universe. AI capabilities are critical. , Metaverse requires machine learning and adapting to the ever-changing environment and performing various tasks, such as 3D reconstruction, perception algorithms, contextual language understanding/audio enhancement and creation, while supporting terminal-side learning."
As 5G flagship chips, what PKs have Qualcomm 8Gen1 and Dimensity 9000 done in these aspects? Qualcomm has a unique experience in the camera experience. The Snapdragon 8Gen1 is equipped with an 18-bit image signal processor. Compared with the 14bit Spectra on the Snapdragon 888, it can process 4000 times the data, allowing the device to capture 3.2 billion pixels per second. In addition, it can process video streams from three 36-megapixel cameras at the same time without delay.
Dimensity 9000 is equipped with the seventh-generation Imagiq imaging chip and adopts hardware-level three-core design. It supports up to 320 million pixel cameras and three 32 million pixel three-camera combinations; video shooting can also support up to 3 channels of 4K HDR video at the same time. . Process 18Bit HDR video at the same time, and all three cameras support triple exposure.
Picture: MediaTek Dimensity 9000. The picture comes from MediaTek.
Recently, since Facebook put forward the vision of the meta universe, hardware manufacturer Nvidia (Nvidia) specially launched the virtual collaboration platform Omniverse. Game companies Roblox and Epic Games have successfully listed and raised funds. There are also giants such as Google, Amazon, and Disney. Carried out the strategic layout of the meta universe. The concept of Meta Universe has exploded. As the underlying technology of Meta Universe, how can AI capabilities empower flagship chips to promote applications?
Take the currently most popular iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max as examples. These two phones are equipped with five-core GPUs. The 5-core GPU increases the graphics processing performance of mobile phones by 30%. Apple iPhone 13 Pro can also drive higher-performance games. The A15 chip has a 16-core "neural engine" and an AI computing power of up to 15.8TOPS. This circuit is dedicated to use today's machine learning technology to accelerate artificial intelligence tasks, and is suitable for a variety of tasks. Implementation support includes Siri's synthesized speech, recognition of information in photos, focusing on faces in photos, and unlocking the phone with face ID.
Coincidentally, the GPU of the new generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen1 is significantly improved by 30% compared with the previous generation chip. This chip uses a brand-new 7th-generation Qualcomm AI engine. This engine uses an ultra-high-performance Qualcomm Hexagon processor. Compared with the previous generation, the tensor accelerator speed and shared memory are both increased to twice that of the previous generation platform. With the support of Qualcomm's team of engineers, Qualcomm and OEM manufacturers and software partners have delivered more than 200 machine learning models this year alone.
The face detection of mobile phones equipped with the Snapdragon 8Gen chip supports better autofocus, auto exposure and auto white balance (3A) and details. Gesture detection allows users to take pictures without pressing any buttons, and AI-based video background blur Advanced features such as chemistry. Qualcomm also added vision to the always-running AI function, empowering Qualcomm's first low-power smart perception camera. The author saw at the exhibition hall of the Snapdragon 8 platform that a mobile phone equipped with the Snapdragon 8 platform can accurately capture the actions of people and recognize their expressions.
Figure: On-site face detection and dynamic recognition of a smartphone equipped with the Snapdragon 8Gen1 chip. Electronic enthusiast shooting
In the front of ecological partners, the first launch of the 5G flagship chip is also a contest. At the scene on December 1, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced that the flagship Xiaomi Mi 12 will use the Snapdragon 8Gen1 platform for the first time, bringing the best mobile experience to users around the world. Fang Fei, president of the product line of Honor Terminal Co., Ltd., pointed out that Honor's upcoming next-generation flagship mobile phones will also be the first to be equipped with a new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platforms. Honor will further release the industry-leading communication, performance, imaging and AI capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, bringing a more extreme technological innovation experience. Global OEM manufacturers and brand partners of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 platform at the scene also include vivo, Redmi, realme, OPPO, OnePlus, Nubia, iQOO, Black Shark, Sony, Sharp and Motorola. Commercial terminals are expected to be available at the end of 2021.
MediaTek has not announced a partner for Dimensity 9000. According to the author's online information, a number of mobile phone manufacturers have tested the MediaTek Dimensity 9000, and this blockbuster chip is expected to enter the flagship mobile phone configuration of brand manufacturers. For commercial terminals, the industry’s forecast is the first quarter of 2022. In the future, the reporter will continue to provide continuous reports on the application of the latest flagship mobile phones with the two major chips.
