On December 8, OPPO announced for the first time on the official blog that its "Mariana MariSilicon X" chip is about to be launched.
According to the understanding of pin play, oppo's core-making action can be traced back to 2017. Shanghai Jinsheng Communication Technology Co., Ltd., which is 100% owned by OPPO, was officially registered in December of that year, and its business project involved "integrated circuit design and service", which was the first time that the public associated OPPO with its own semiconductor business.
In the following two years, OPPO released the corresponding chip engineer position in the official recruitment, set up a chip technology committee internally, and as its wholly-owned subsidiaries are more involved in the chip business, in 2021, the "Mariana Plan" was mentioned for the first time in OPPO's "Some Thoughts on Building Core Technologies" internal article.
As early as March this year, Pin Play also heard that OPPO's internal core-making team has grown rapidly to a staggering 2,000 people, and the main research direction is different from the solutions that already exist on the market.
After nearly five years of rumors, OPPO decided to officially meet the first results of the program.
Mariana is the deepest known trench in the world, and the depth of the bottom of the trench below sea level is greater than the height above the sea level of Mount Everest, representing the difficulty of self-developed chips. 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. ”
On December 14, 2021, OPPO released OPPO's first image-specific NPU, Mariana MariSilicon X, at the 3rd OPPO Future Technology Conference 2021 (OPPO INNO DAY 2021) with the theme of "To Be Kind and Move Forward". Mariana MariSilicon X is OPPO's first self-developed chip, the world's first dedicated NPU chip for imaging, and another big gamble for OPPO on the road of technology.
The gamblers sitting on the bench
In the past two years, the global mobile phone market has indeed undergone great changes: under the global economic situation, China's mobile phone market is undergoing a reshuffle, some brands have gone from online to offline, and strive to expand their share, and some brands have focused on self-developed high-end technology, hoping to support the need for brands to leap upwards; and after Huawei encountered Waterloo in overseas markets, Apple has created a strong Hengqiang format in the high-end market with the help of systematic capabilities.
It can be seen that at this market stage, the products of self-developed chips not only bring more differentiated functions, but also enhance the control ability of mobile phone manufacturers in the technical system. Judging from the past experience of technology iteration, behind the technological competition also represents the survival of the fittest in the mobile phone market.
To put it simply, the rapid iteration of products in the past has been unable to meet the market, and today's mobile phone manufacturers need to perceive the needs of more segmented users, create more differentiated products, and enhance the competitiveness of products. As Chen Mingyong said: "If there is no underlying core technology, there can be no future, and the flagship product without the underlying core technology is a castle in the air." "In this direction, self-developed chips have become the only way to go."
The boom of self-developed chips has become a silhouette of the deep involvement of domestic mobile phones in the semiconductor industry. But as we all know, the chip is a project that requires sitting on the cold bench for ten years.
In the past, the mobile phone chip we were familiar with actually referred to more soC, that is, the system on chip. The system-on-chip is actually a more complex and massive system, and this system on-chip is a collection of components including the cpu CPU, graphics processor GPU, digital signal processor DPS, baseband chip Modem, image processor ISP, and neural processing unit NPU.
But whether it is Apple or Huawei Samsung, it has spent nearly a decade on the research and development of its own processors. In the past decade, we often see only the ability to productize chips in the continuous iteration, and behind the scenes, the manpower, capital and material resources consumed by them are often more amazing, which is a long-term strategy that a company needs to carry.
The general argument in the market is that chip research and development is an industry with high technical research and development skills, long continuous investment time, and long-term inability to see returns.
Therefore, before directly making SoC, the dual-core architecture has become a mainstream direction for mobile phone manufacturers today. In general, SoCs may adopt market-mature solutions, but because they want to create differentiated functions, replacing an internal component like a building block has become a research direction. This method is also more practical, but also convenient for consumers to bring differentiated perception, because the general chip can not meet the specific needs of different manufacturers for a certain aspect of performance, specially customized chips to meet their own needs to help manufacturers to promote their own technical routes.
For example, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have piled up "ISP customization" in the past two years. This year, Vivo announced the first imaging flagship vivo X70 series, and the interior is equipped with its first self-developed ISP (image signal processor) chip V1. Xiaomi's surging C1 chip is also installed on the flagship mobile phone of Xiaomi MIX FOLD, which is also the main ISP-related function.
In fact, before Huawei shined in the field of mobile phone imaging, it was also through the acquisition of the OMAP team disbanded by Texas Instruments that it created a self-developed ISP on the Kirin 950, which laid the absolute image strength of Huawei's mobile phone in the market in one fell swoop, and then swept the high-end mobile phone market. This seems to be a path that has been proven to be correct.
But this time, the ISP is not the direction that OPPO aims at this time, and the Mariana MariSilicon X is positioned as the world's first NPU chip.
Mobile phone manufacturers aim at the direction of NPU, which is rare in the industry.
Why NPU?
Different from ISPs, in fact, in the system on-chip, NPU is more important in the AI algorithm scenario.
After smartphones brought us into the era of mobile Internet, AI has gradually entered mobile phones. If you pay close attention to the current smart phones, AI functions have gradually expanded and tried some productization, such as AI network acceleration, AI energy saving optimization, AI intelligent recognition, AI map translation, and handheld super night scenes, etc., almost all of which are inseparable from AI acceleration operations.
And AI is also used for the function of taking pictures, such as computational photography - after shooting through AI intelligent retouching, automatically adjusted to better colors and exposures; or intelligent scene recognition during framing - automatic adjustment to "pet" mode, also used in the ability of AI calculation.
ISPs and NPUs go in completely different directions. Conceptually, it can be said that NPU gives AI computing power to mobile phones, realizes more function optimization, and can cover more scenes - and this computing power is exactly what ISPs do not have.
OPPO mentioned that the first image-specific NPU - Mariana MariSilicon X uses the DSA architecture, and the world's cutting-edge technology companies are currently using DSA for AI, such as Google's Tensor, because DSA's AI chip has better performance than GPU. However, the use of the DSA architecture also means that the specificity of this chip, for the manufacturer's chip direction planning requirements are extremely high, you need to predict in advance in the chip development to commercial a few years, where the image outlet is, and then set the precise direction of user demand to move forward.
In terms of direction, OPPO predicted the development direction of computational photography in the future, and gained insight into the development trend of images, so that "video becomes a new anchor point after image saturation competition", and through Mariana MariSilicon X, it uses AI technology to solve the traditional mobile phone image problem - low-light video quality, and pushes computational photography to a new limit of 4K+20bit RAW+AI+Ultra HDR.
In other words, oppo to achieve its own image goals, need to through the form of self-developed special NPU, to maximize the problem of computing power and energy efficiency, and the general chip may not be able to meet the computing power and energy efficiency requirements of AI for computing images.
At the same time, the self-developed chip allows OPPO to complete the vertical integration of image links for the first time, and has the ability to solve the industry's long-term imaging problems, including the customized use of sensors and the three-party APP ecology.
What convenience will NPU chips bring to users?
Mariana MariSilicon X can be said to be a big gamble in OPPO's R&D system. From the beginning, OPPO Mariana MariSilicon X has been self-developed by OPPO from architectural design, core IP design, logic design and physical design.
Mariana MariSilicon X was designed with a more difficult 6nm advanced process. In fact, there is no reference design for 6nm independent NPU on the market, which means that the work itself is not referenceable, and it is self-evident that high investment, high risk, high difficulty and high uncertainty are self-evident.
According to the understanding of pin play, at the same time, the cost of 1 tape-out is as high as 100 million, and no one knows whether it is successful before the official tape-out experiment, and once it fails, it faces a reversal.
But now the appearance of Mariana MariSilicon X should also mean that OPPO's toughest time has passed. Of course, there are many challenges ahead for them.
But for now, what exactly can Mariana Marisilicon X bring to users?
From the AI energy efficiency breakthrough: Mariana MariSilicon X 18Tops AI hash rate even exceeds apple A15; energy efficiency 11.6Tops/w, running OPPO AI noise reduction model is 20 times faster than reaching The Find X3 Pro (Snapdragon 888), energy efficiency reached 40 times. The excellent energy efficiency of 11.6 TOPS per watt means that smartphones can run complex AI noise reduction models, enabling video AI noise reduction.
With Mariana MariSilicon X, the app's products also have the opportunity to support the highest eye-level 20-bit Ultra HDR, covering a maximum brightness range of 1 million:1, which is 4 times the current mainstream HDR capability in the industry. This means that the machine can support HDR video with higher dynamic range, which even surpasses Qualcomm's new generation Snapdragon 8 platform.
In fact, high dynamic range videos are more than just showing. For those familiar with video production, presentation is only one part of it, and imaging generally involves all parts of the video industry process such as shooting, decoding and production – which is also enhanced by the addition of Mariana MariSilicon X.
The RAW domain is the golden point of computational photography, and mariana MariSilicon X supports 20-bit RAW computing, which pushes the traditional computation that can only be done in post-processing to the forefront, and outputs losslessly computed high-quality data for the entire image link, which can bring about the improvement of basic image quality.
In addition, Mariana MariSilicon X leverages the enhanced capabilities of RGBW to achieve an 8.6dB signal-to-noise ratio improvement and a 1.7x resolution increase through dual-link design and 2x RAW computation.
Functionally, Mariana MariSilicon X achieves the sharp image quality of ultra-clear night photos in a 4K 30-frame AI HDR video for the first time, making every frame of the video a good photo.
It can also be said that the product equipped with Mariana MariSilicon X will be an image flagship product that has been multiplied from the underlying AI operations, to video quality, and color.
OPPO into no man's land
In 2019, OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong said that OPPO should have the courage to enter the deep water area of research and development and innovation. "This is what we must do, we have no way out, through the innovation and breakthrough of core basic technology, OPPO has its own technology moat."
Choosing not to "follow" other friends and businessmen to gather in the ISP field shows that oppo has its own independent thinking and judgment on the road of vertical integration of the first image link.
OPPO created the Mariana MariSilicon X with the aim of building a set of "image systematization" capabilities.
"It is difficult to distinguish between winning and losing in the photo competition, and video has become the next competitive track", the original intention of real-time processing of videos with higher challenges is the beginning of this systematization capability.
In terms of the functions realized, the 4K+AI+HDR specification night scene video that OPPO can achieve at the same time has indeed reached the current mobile phone image ceiling.
The reason why Apple can become Apple today is precisely because it started from the self-development and customization of components, and gradually created a set of ecological closed loops from the bottom of the hardware, to software functions, and then to the development of three-party apps.
OPPO's eyes are still a deserted road. But as Chen Mingyong said, "Insist on doing the right thing, the right road, not afraid of the distance, not afraid of difficulties." ”