Apple has always had a fondness for self-developed chips, as early as 1986, Apple was dissatisfied with the performance of the chips provided by suppliers at that time, so it specially formed a chip design team, the project code name Aquarius (Aquarius). However, at that time, Apple was still a small white in the chip industry, not only lacked experience, there was not enough development resources and chip talents in the company, and the plan could only end in failure.
After experiencing the Aquarius project, Apple's core-making plan has become relatively cautious, mostly acquiring industry chip companies in advance to accumulate technology, talents and patents, forming a certain replacement of the original chip capital before releasing products. Such as the A4 chip, anecdotal rumors A4 and Samsung S5PC110 core layout is similar, mainly because Apple acquired Thetrinsity Company, which has cooperated with Samsung.
After the A4, the iPhone has used its own CPU and GPU architecture, but this is not enough, Apple will also develop more chips. On December 17, according to Bloomberg, Apple established a new research and development team in Southern California to recruit developers for chips such as modems, radio frequencies, Bluetooth and WIFI. Apple's purpose is obvious, to grasp as much as possible about the design capabilities of different chips and reduce dependence on external manufacturers.
Specializes in chip design
Compared with Samsung's integrated development model of production and research, Apple takes a more pure chip design route. Apple's chip development context is based on its own technical conditions and importance, temporarily can not be self-developed chips first rely on third-party suppliers to solve, when the breakthrough of other chip technology, and then according to the specific situation to adjust the new research and development program, mobile phone baseband is one of the representatives.
In March last year, according to a report by Fast Technology, Apple will set up a research and development center in Munich, Europe, focusing on the research and development of baseband technology, Apple's site is aimed at European communications talents, which is convenient for absorbing technical personnel from industry giants such as Ericsson and Nokia. The location of southern California is similar, Southern California's Irving is home to NXP Semiconductors' wireless chip design office, and there is also Irvine Southern California nearby, which is convenient for digging walls and attracting university chip research and development talents.
Baseband chip as the majority of the cost of mobile phones, self-developed baseband is an important means for Apple to reduce costs and enhance the technical control of the industrial chain, to Fomalhaut's previous estimates, iPhone 12 the most expensive components are not A14 chips and Samsung OLED screens, but from Qualcomm's X55 baseband.
In the current mobile phone SoC production and research pattern, Apple is in a very special position in the industry, in addition to Google, which has just launched a self-developed chip, the rest of Qualcomm, HiSilicon, MediaTek and Samsung have their own baseband, so there are often comments on the network that Apple's A series chips are not "real" SoCs. Apple's model of developing other chips from CPU to GPU, the main advantages and disadvantages roughly include the following points.
From the perspective of the industrial chain, smart phones are similar to PCs, home appliances and other industries, which are composed of a set of design to production and other aspects of the division of labor. According to Huachuang Securities' prediction of the home appliance industry chain, the highest profit is the "design + brand" link, followed by the "R&D, production and marketing", ODM (design and oem), oem (OEM) model. Apple's main promotion of the research and development of different chips is to control the design of different chips, for Apple to obtain not only a higher profit margin, but more importantly, to grasp the iterative rhythm of chips.
The smart phone industry is extremely dependent on the technical upgrading of the supply chain, and upstream manufacturers can often decide what components mobile phone manufacturers use, in other words, the product "characteristics" and update rhythm of mobile phone manufacturers depend on the face of the supply chain. Apple can rely on product sales volume and chip design capabilities to react to the supply chain, weaken some supply chain links into the role of foundries, and avoid the model of relying solely on supply chain technology to update products.
Compared with Apple, Samsung's integrated production and research layout can extend the tentacles into different industries, including mobile phone SoC chips, screen display panels and memory, etc., and can design and manufacture themselves. The risk of Apple's pure design model is that some chips that are not strong enough in technology may affect the use experience of terminal products, such as Apple's self-developed power management IC, after which there was news that the iPhone charging power was conservative and related to the performance of Apple's self-developed power IC chip.
In recent years, with the intensification of market competition, some domestic mobile phone brands are increasing chip research and development efforts, trying to increase product competitiveness through more self-developed technologies to obtain breakthroughs in the high-end mobile phone market.
Core building is already an industry trend
The demand for domestic mobile phone brands to develop self-developed chips is related to the current supply chain pattern. First of all, at the product level, the main Android mobile phone SoC suppliers are MediaTek and Qualcomm, and the new competitive landscape of the supply chain and mobile phone market makes the main hardware of major domestic mobile phone brands tend to be homogenized, and it is impossible to rely on self-developed technology to build product differentiation like Apple and Samsung.
Secondly, the product update rhythm of domestic mobile phone brands needs to follow the supply chain. Taking ISP as an example, in the era of high-end mobile phones are fighting for image strength, MediaTek and Qualcomm's flagship chips change every year, while domestic mobile phone manufacturers will release a number of flagship machines a year, under the premise of CMOS and algorithm improvement, the annual ISP can not meet the fast-paced market layout of manufacturers. Previously, some digital bloggers have mentioned that Qualcomm ISP has made great progress, but the rhythm of the change of the year cannot meet the speed of Xiaomi's mobile phone image progress.
At the level of software and hardware adaptation, MediaTek and Qualcomm's hardware upgrades have their own plans, and the release of new chips often requires mobile phone manufacturers to re-adapt, which is undoubtedly a disaster for the imaging department of mobile phone manufacturers, and needs to debug algorithms according to the new ISP module in SoC. When the algorithm is delegated to other models, because the soC needs to be specially adapted, it can be described as "increasing power consumption in vain".
Considering the technical threshold of self-developed chips and the realistic needs of mobile phone image development, vivo and OPPO both start from image chips, on the one hand, they can enhance the image strength of flagship mobile phones and increase product differentiation selling points; on the other hand, the technical threshold of image chips is slightly lower, which is conducive to the accumulation of technology by mobile phone manufacturers, and then integrated into self-developed SoCs.
Whether it's SoCs, or "small" chips like ISPs and NPUs, chip design is destined to be a path full of flower applause or ride the storm, where high risk and high yield coexist. When Huawei released K3V2 in 2012, it was complained about by many netizens due to performance problems, and the failure of Apple's Aquarius project in 1986 also received a lot of doubts, from the release of the first generation of chips to maturity basically need to go a long way.
The advantage of "OV Meter" at this stage of the development of self-developed chips is that the current chip industry is more mature, and the development of manufacturers such as HiSilicon, SMIC and Shanghai Microelectronics has cultivated a number of talents for the market, so the first generation of chips of vivo and OPPO has a shorter research and development time, the products are more mature, and the arrival of self-developed chips has also made domestic mobile phone manufacturers more confident and Apple Samsung.
Taking Huawei HiSilicon as an example, with the support of self-developed chips, Huawei mobile phones have the advantage of "time difference" in addition to more obvious product differentiation and accelerating the improvement of mobile phone image levels. HiSilicon Kirin's new chips are generally released around September and October of each year, and Mate models equipped with new SoC will also be listed after this, which is just stuck in the market exclusivity period of several months before a large wave of new Snapdragon models are listed.
Under the wave of smart device development, the development of self-developed chips by domestic mobile phone manufacturers is not only for mobile phones, all kinds of smart wearables and smart home devices need corresponding chips, in other words, manufacturers may also be in the mobile phone chip as the core of the next game of chess.
The phone chip is just a prelude
The first thing to mention is the "spillover effect", which means that when an organization engages in an activity, the results of which not only affect organizations and individuals, but also affect people outside the organization or society. In the Internet and technology industries, the manufacturer's self-developed technology reaches a certain result, or will spill over to form a new business, Ali and Amazon to meet the computing power needs of e-commerce business and developed cloud computing, spilled out into Alibaba Cloud and AWS.
Because the mobile phone SoC is a highly integrated chip, the CPU, GPU and ISP parts inside can be spilled over to other devices, and Apple adopts a similar approach. The S6 Sip chip used by the Apple Watch S6 is based on the performance core improvement of the A13, and the A14 and M1 are similar. The same architecture magic reform scheme can not only meet the computing power needs of different devices, but also focus on reducing dependence on third-party chip manufacturers, reducing supply chain risks and improving profits.
The image chips of the "OV meter" three can actually develop similar solutions, such as being installed in smart cameras, smart cars, tablets and even VR devices (OPPO NPU), forming a complete set of chip ecology.
With the continuous deepening of chip research by domestic mobile phone manufacturers, it is only a matter of time before the development of SoC-class chips. In the simulation scenario of the future metaverse, the demand for chip computing power is further improved (VR 16K resolution). At this time, the domestic mobile phone manufacturers that vigorously develop self-developed chips are in the layout of the future, and the future intelligent terminals, whether they are new forms of mobile phones or AR/VR devices, the core of which must be driven by chips with stronger computing power. Major manufacturers have gone to build cores, and the intensification of industry competition may also accelerate the arrival of the next generation of intelligent terminal devices, and the ultimate beneficiary will be us as ordinary consumers.