In recent years, major mobile phone giants have invested in chip research and development, and in 2019, Apple spent a huge amount of $1 billion to acquire most of Intel's smartphone modem chip business to help its own 5G chip research and development. It is reported that in 2023, Apple will be expected to use its own 5G modem chip to the iPhone. Not only Apple, China's domestic enterprises have also been making efforts in the chip industry, of which Huawei is the most eye-catching, such as the Kirin 990 chip officially launched by Huawei last year, which has aroused heated discussion. In terms of chips, Huawei has always hoped to create a controllable chip industry chain, so as to get rid of the constraints of the outside world.
As we all know, since Huawei's achievements in the field of 5G, it has been frequently suppressed by the United States and other countries, which has affected Huawei's mobile phone business one after another. The US crackdown on Huawei inevitably reminds people of Toshiba, Alstom and other companies in those days. Toshiba was originally a semiconductor industry giant, but after being targeted, the development in the semiconductor field slowed down rapidly, and the same was true of Alstom, the manufacturing giant of the year. The difference is that Huawei and under the pressure of the outside world, but more and more frustrated, the later development of Huawei Hongmeng OS system is a good proof. With Huawei taking the lead, other major mobile phone manufacturers have also begun to work hard, following Huawei, OPPO has finally embarked on the road of core building and achieved results.
According to the news of the observer network, a few days ago, the OPPO 2021 annual future science and technology conference was successfully held in Shenzhen. At the conference, OPPO announced a number of heavyweight scientific research results and products, including OPPO's first self-developed chip NPU chip "Mariana MariSilicon X". It is understood that the chip is built by TSMC's 6nm advanced process, which is currently the world's first mobile terminal independent imaging special NPU chip, and the machine is quite outstanding in image technology optimization. According to the measured data, the AI performance of the "Mariana MariSilicon X" chip is even stronger than that of the A15.
OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong said that "Mariana MariSilicon X" is just a small step for OPPO to develop its own chips, and OPPO will continue to invest more resources and use a team of thousands of people to do self-developed chips. Notably, the Mariana MariSilicon X chip delivers breakthroughs in four technologies: lossless real-time RAW computing, powerful AI computing energy efficiency, industry-leading Ultra HDR, and RGBW Pro that maximizes sensor capabilities.
In addition, at the OPPO conference, they also announced OPPO's first folding screen product, OPPO Find N. In the past two years, the folding screen has been highly sought after by the market, but due to the high price, many consumers are prohibitive, and this OPPO will be the pricing of this folding screen at more than 7,000, directly folding screen to the civilian market. As for the "Mariana MariSilicon X" chip launched by OPPO this time, it will also be used in the OPPO high-end flagship Find X series released in the first quarter of 2022.
The emergence of the "Mariana MariSilicon X" chip is a milestone in OPPO Find X's domestic self-developed technology. In order to develop self-developed chip technology, OPPO invested 50 billion yuan in three years, and now it seems that the 50 billion is not in vain, and OPPO has successfully become another "domestic dark horse" after Huawei.