OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong delivered a speech at the conference
On December 14, OPPO held the 2021 Annual Future Technology Conference in Shenzhen, at which OPPO released the first self-developed NPU chip "Mariana MariSilicon X", as well as OPPO's new generation of smart glasses OPPO Air Glass for exploring the XR world.
It is reported that "Mariana MariSilicon X" is the first tape-out product set up by OPPO to set up a self-developed chip team in 2019, which uses 6nm advanced process, has four major technological breakthroughs, and is the first independent imaging NPU chip on the mobile terminal.
Oppo Air Glass smart glasses, while taking into account the light characteristics, are also equipped with practical functions, and the overall design is similar to the battle index measuring device in the "Dragon Ball" comic.
Chen Mingyong, founder and CEO of OPPO, said, "Mariana MariSilicon X is just a small step for OPPO's self-developed chips, and OPPO will continue to invest resources in the future to make self-developed chips with a team of thousands of people." No matter how many challenges lie ahead, we will persevere and insist that Qingshan will not relax. ”
Mariana MariSilicon X, a key step in oppo's underlying core technology breakthrough
As OPPO's first in-house designed and developed image-specific NPU chip, Mariana MariSilicon X is the world's first mobile-independent NPU with a 6nm advanced process, with four technological breakthroughs: powerful AI computing energy efficiency, leading Ultra HDR, lossless real-time RAW computing, and RGBW Pro that maximizes sensor capabilities.
Among the above four technological breakthroughs, especially in the energy efficiency of AI computing, Mariana MariSilicon X adopts a new golden architecture concept for the future AI era - DSA (Domain Specific Architecture), to achieve "dedicated core", its AI computing power can reach up to 18TOPS, while the power consumption is controlled to 11.6TOPS per watt, creating an energy efficiency milestone for mobile phone NPUs.
In the future, with four major technological breakthroughs, Mariana MariSilicon X can fully serve OPPO's customized computing image needs in the future, helping OPPO truly realize the vertical integration capability on the image link.
It is worth mentioning that Mariana MariSilicon X is not a PPT release, and oppo also directly indicates that its high-end flagship Find X latest series will take the lead in carrying the chip, which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2022, so OPPO will also officially open the dual-core era of flagship mobile phones.
At present, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are making efforts in the field of self-developed chips, and Huawei, Xiaomi, vivo, etc. have successively launched self-developed chips in different fields. Whether it is to impact the high-end market or to develop in depth in the era of artificial intelligence, self-developed chips can not only better realize the collaboration of their own software and hardware, solve the pain points that users care about, but also bring more differentiation to mobile phone brand manufacturers.
After the meeting, Titanium Media App conducted an interview with Jiang Bo, senior director of OPPO chip products. Jiang Bo said that the reason for choosing the NPU of the image track as OPPO's first self-developed chip is mainly because from the perspective of consumers, from the user's use scenario, the main solution is the user's pain points, to achieve the leap in their own image strength.
At this time, when the upstream SoC can not meet the demand, self-research becomes the only way. In the future, OPPO's self-developed chips will not be limited to the image NPU alone.
On the other hand, if OPPO is the same as Xiaomi and directly self-developed from the SoC main chip, it faces more technical difficulties, and the actual effect after the actual tape-out mass production and installation will not necessarily be good. In this case, cutting from a peripheral chip other than the main soC chip of the mobile phone is relatively simple and more likely to be successful.
With the development of mobile phone imaging technology, due to the limitation of the internal space of smart phones, relying solely on improving the size of the image sensor and the performance of other optical units to improve the image effect of the shooting has encountered a bottleneck, so the "computed image" that optimizes the shooting effect through AI algorithms has become a new direction.
In particular, OPPO has always been known for mobile phone images, and this time Mariana MariSilicon X is also a track that adheres to OPPO's insistence and consolidates its mobile phone image status.
This time, the 6nm process adopted by Mariana MariSilicon X, OPPO also revealed its cooperation with TSMC. But why did it not choose the relatively mature 12nm process.
Jiang Bo explained: "It is difficult for the 12nm process to achieve the extreme performance and power consumption requirements expected by OPPO at the terminal level, so the 6nm process was finally selected, achieving the best energy efficiency ratio in the same class, and also being able to achieve the processing of complex AI algorithms in the RAW domain." ”
OPPO's new generation of smart glasses, the transformation from toys to tools
In addition to the release of the black technology of self-developed chips, OPPO also demonstrated another technological achievement - OPPO Air Glass, which comes from OPPO's "3+N+X" technology transition strategy that represents the ubiquitous field of differentiation ability X.
In fact, in the first two years of the Future Technology Conference, OPPO has launched two generations of AR products, and the release of OPPO Air Glass has realized the transformation from toys to tools.
Liu Chang, president of OPPO Research Institute, said that for auxiliary reality products, information is the pain point that users are most eager to break through, and the product must be easy to use and practical.
OPPO's new generation of smart glasses OPPO Air Glass, weighing less than 30 grams and a lens thickness of only 1.3 mm, is one of the lightest smart glasses in the industry. OPPO cooperates with the Key Laboratory of Human Factors and Ergonomics of the China Institute of Standardization to fully verify the comfort and safety of the user's vision in the context of long-term wearing, so that there is no burden for long-term wear.
OPPO Air Glass ensures lightweight design features while also taking into account practical functions. Practical functions such as information reminders, real-time navigation, portable translation, and speech teleprompters can be realized. OPPO Air Glass has effectively promoted smart glasses products into people's daily lives through a series of innovations, making smart glasses complete the transformation from toys to tools.
The product will be available worldwide in the spring of 2022. At that time, OPPO will also open all SDKs and work with more developers to promote the construction of the XR ecosystem.
Finally, OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong said that he also brought a new message about OnePlus. According to him, the OnePlus brand will also officially return to OPPO in 2021. In the future, OnePlus will enter the market as a sub-brand of OPPO. (This article was first published on titanium media App)