Text/Sun Pengyue
Edit/Gale
In December, the mobile phone industry set off an annual public opinion war.
On December 1, Beijing time, Qualcomm officially released a new generation of flagship SoC Snapdragon 8 Gen1. Many Android manufacturers responded for the first time, announcing that their flagships will be equipped with a new generation of Snapdragon chips. Xiaomi mobile phone executives and Lenovo mobile phone executives also openly fear each other on social platforms because of who is the "real Snapdragon 8".
In the end, Lenovo won, and its sub-brand Motorola Edge X30 launched the new generation of Snapdragon 8 in the world on December 9.
Once upon a time, the "Snapdragon debut" has become a conventional aura, and putting it on it is the symbol of the true flagship. Not only can it be bragged on the product promotional poster, but it is also a weapon for brand fans to attack other brands. This sense of immediate vision of the glorious ancestors, even apples can not catch up with Qualcomm's scenery.
The invincible market has also made Qualcomm deeply involved in patent monopoly litigation: in 2015, Qualcomm was fined 6.088 billion yuan by China for suspected monopoly; in 2018, Qualcomm was fined 997 million euros by the European Union; in 2019, the EUROPEAN Union continued to impose a fine of $270 million on Qualcomm; at the end of December of the same year, the South Korean anti-monopoly department fined Qualcomm $950 million...
Despite successive antitrust investigations by China, South Korea, and the European Union, in the smartphone market, paying high-pass taxes is still an inevitable choice for most mobile phone manufacturers.
Domestic mobile phones cannot escape Qualcomm
For Qualcomm, the performance of the previous generation's flagship SoC Snapdragon 888 was unsatisfactory, because of design defects, resulting in excessive power consumption, causing the phone to be hot, the battery is not durable and so on. A number of Android manufacturers paid for Qualcomm's design flaws, and the flagship model sold poorly throughout the year, and the iPhone 13 stole the first sales.
This time, in order to get rid of the shadow of its predecessor, Qualcomm changed the naming method of Snapdragon's flagship SoC since 2013, changing the 3-digit nomenclature to a new generation of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, referred to as Snapdragon 8.
This time, the Snapdragon 8 processor adopts arm v9 architecture, inheriting the previous generation of "1+3+4" three-bundle scheme, the super core is upgraded from Cortex-X1 to Cortex-X2, and the main frequency is upgraded from 2.84GHz to 3GHz; 3 Cortex-A710 large cores are upgraded to 2.5GHz; 4 Cortex-A510 small core main frequencies have not changed, but the secondary cache has changed from 4 to 2. According to Qualcomm, the new Snapdragon 8 processor will have a 20% increase in CPU performance and a 30% increase in energy efficiency.
Snapdragon 8 uses the most advanced 4nm process and is oem by Samsung. It is worth mentioning that the 5nm chip of the previous generation of Snapdragon 888 is also foundry by Samsung, with bad reviews and market feedback far inferior to TSMC OEM. According to DigiTimes, this time Samsung is still overturning, and its 4nm process has a yield rate problem, which has triggered Qualcomm's dissatisfaction and is likely to be terminated.
Although users are not optimistic about the prospects of "Made in Samsung", the Snapdragon 8 has been supported by all Android mobile phone manufacturers as soon as it was launched, and there are already Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, Redmi, vivo, OnePlus, realme, iQOO, ZTE, Nubia, Red Magic, Glory, Black Shark, Motorola and other brand flagships announced.
Qualcomm's "monopoly" of the mobile phone chip market is not achieved overnight.
In the barbaric development period of the just emerging of smart phones, the mobile phone chip market is in a chaotic battle, the processors and related core components equipped with the flagship machines of major brands are not uniform, and the market does not have a chip manufacturer that measures the flagship standard.
For example, Texas Instruments, which dabbled in SoC in 2003, has dominated the global market for a long time and created countless classic models. The OMAP4430 and OMAP4460 chips in the era of smart phones are classics of a generation, and their performance is ahead of qualcomm's MSM8260 dual-core processor in the same period. Once Huawei P1, Motorola RAZR, Samsung GALAXY mobile phones are equipped with this flagship Soc.
Texas Instruments, because of a mistake in judgment, insisted on developing a dual-core heterogeneous processor. In the "running score era" of the core of the competition, it was gradually not accepted by the market, drowning in an "eight-core processor", and finally announced the abandonment of the mobile phone Soc market.
There are also Samsung GALAXY dual flagships that once competed with the iPhone, and used their own Exynos chips in the early days. In addition, the Exynos chip is also licensed to Meizu, which has been a big fan of Samsung chips from the first Android phone M9 to the MX3 in 2014.
Qualcomm's old rival MediaTek, the MT6577 dual-core processor promoted at that time, has a very high share in the 2,000 yuan market, and is favored by vivo, Lenovo, neutral, cool and other domestic manufacturers, becoming a cost-effective artifact.
With the development of the times and the passage of 4G networks, mobile phone processors are becoming more and more complex. Other processor manufacturers other than Qualcomm have gradually fallen under the patent barriers of baseband components and gradually fallen behind, and the Soc market has been completely occupied by Qualcomm.
Qualcomm taxes are hard to escape
According to Qualcomm's financial report for the first three quarters of 2021, the total revenue in the first three quarters of 2021 was 33.566 billion US dollars; of which the semiconductor chip business revenue was 27.019 billion US dollars, with revenue growth of 64% and profit as high as 7.763 billion US dollars; patent licensing revenue was 6.32 billion US dollars, an increase of 25.7% in revenue, and profit was as high as 4.627 billion US dollars.
Qualcomm's patent licensing license is commonly known as the "Qualcomm Tax" in the industry, with the patent barriers built from the 2G era, harvesting all mobile phone manufacturers around the world, even Apple can not escape the "Qualcomm Tax".
Many people do not understand Qualcomm's patent barriers and mistakenly think that it is the cost of using Snapdragon processors. But the "Qualcomm Tax" is actually a patent for 3G and 4G network technology communications. Although Qualcomm is only well known to netizens in the era of smart phones, its figure has been active as early as the 2G era.
In 1993, Qualcomm in the 2G era began to lay out globally with CDMA technology, forming a standardized commercial mobile communication network. In 1999, the International Telecommunication Union officially selected Qualcomm's CDMA technology as the standard for 3G technology, thus building a WCDMA network standard on the basis of CDMA.
With up to 90% of cdma's core patents, any mobile phone equipped with WCDMA standard communication must pay Qualcomm a large patent fee. This is also the earliest patent charging model established by Qualcomm, and it has been used to this day.
In the 4G era, Qualcomm invested in the acquisition of Flyrion and obtained 16% of the 4G LTE core communication patents. 4G patents are very scattered, except for Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung, Ericsson, etc. all hold a considerable number of 4G core patents. However, because 4G LTE is generally compatible with 3G and 2G networks, Qualcomm began to "play rogue", proposing that 4G patents must be packaged with 3G and 2G, and even include some useless and expired patents, and compulsorily charge a patent licensing fee of 3-5%.
And this proportion is charged according to the price of the whole machine, that is, the higher the price of your mobile phone, the more money you pay Qualcomm.
The "Qualcomm tax" has overwhelmed the global mobile phone industry, and many companies have tried to resist Qualcomm's "patent tyranny", but they are facing Qualcomm's legal proceedings and Snapdragon chip supply cuts.
In 2017, Apple formally sued Qualcomm, demanding that Qualcomm return $1 billion in patent royalties. Although the iPhone uses Apple's self-developed A-series chips, the baseband components that affect the network communication function have been banned by Qualcomm.
Apple was forced to use Intel's 4G baseband, resulting in negative problems such as poor network signal and poor communication signal in the iPhone X series and iPhone 11 series, which directly affected Apple's brand image. Forced by market pressure, Apple finally reconciled with Qualcomm, and the iPhone 12 series could use Qualcomm's new 5G baseband.
Not only Apple, domestic mobile phone manufacturer Meizu was also notified in court in 2016 for "infringing 4G/3G communication patents" and claiming 520 million yuan. Meizu, which has just completed the 20 million shipment record with the sub-brand Charm Blue, was hit hard and was directly banned from selling Snapdragon chips by Qualcomm. The loss of the Snapdragon blessing has led to the gradual erosion of the market. Meizu, which was originally able to compete with Xiaomi, eventually became a third-tier small factory.
Under the infamy, manufacturers still have to succumb to Qualcomm's patent barriers despite their reluctance.
Qualcomm in the 5G era
The heavenly anger and resentment of Qualcomm has come to the extreme point where things must be reversed.
Breaking the Qualcomm monopoly is becoming the consensus of the global industry. Forced to be helpless, Qualcomm can only reduce the "Qualcomm tax" of 5% of the whole machine, and set the upper limit to $13. Not only is the patent fee less than half, but what makes Qualcomm worse is that the 5G era has arrived.
According to the parity report: In the field of 5G, Qualcomm's patents are 1293, ranking only seventh, far inferior to Huawei, which has mastered many core technologies of 5G. Qualcomm will have a hard time recreating the patent barriers of 4G in the 5G era.
(Source: Parity)
The Snapdragon chip, which accounts for 80% of Qualcomm's total turnover, was also crushed by Apple because of the design defects of the previous generation flagship SoC Snapdragon 888. More and more users have distrusted Snapdragon and begun to switch to Huawei Kirin, Samsung Exynos, and MediaTek Tianji.
Just a few days before the release of the Snapdragon 8, the old rival MediaTek also released a new generation of flagship SoC "Tianji 9000", in an attempt to emulate AMD's counterattack intel template and regain the former market.
And this "Tianji 9000" adopts the same specifications as Snapdragon 8 Arm v9 architecture, the world's first chip using TSMC 4nm process, but also has X2 CPU, G710 GPU, 7500Mbps LPDDR5 memory, 5G R16, Bluetooth 5.3 and other more than 10 black technology blessings. According to the official running score of An Tutu, Tianji's 9000 running score reached a staggering 1007396 points, becoming the first mobile phone chip to break the ceiling of one million, which attracted heated discussion on the whole network.
A number of mobile phone manufacturers announced that they will use the Tianji 9000 processor, including Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, OnePlus, Redmi, realme, Samsung...
According to reports, in the mobile phone market in 2022, the flagship machine will use a "dual-chip" line, and there will be two versions of Snapdragon 8 and Tianji 9000 for consumers to choose. In this way, Qualcomm's high-end market will be shaken, and it will no longer be the only one in Snapdragon chips.
Monopoly is the biggest enemy that undermines the competitiveness of the industry. Although Qualcomm has achieved brilliant results in the 4G era, the times have changed. Whether it is a 5G communication patent or a mobile phone SoC chip, Qualcomm will face competition from many Chinese companies. Last year's Snapdragon 888, which hit the street, is still a lesson for the past, and users' trust in Qualcomm is also declining.
We have reason to believe that whether it is MediaTek or Huawei Kirin, the future SoC market will no longer be dominated by Qualcomm.