As we all know, for the consumer electronics industry, "naming" has long become an almost thoroughly pondered science. Whether it is the CPU on the PC, the graphics card, or the SoC or image CMOS in the mobile phone, behind their "model" names, most of them have a set of naming rules that can be followed and strictly observed.
To be sure, this strict, formulaic approach to product naming makes a lot of sense. For enterprises, this will facilitate product version management and avoid supply chain chaos. For consumers, many times they can also simply and intuitively know the market positioning, performance level, and even the counterpoint relationship with competitors through naming, and even do not need to know any deep related knowledge.
For example, in the graphics card industry, whether it is NVIDIA or AMD, "the model of the hundredth figure 9 is the flagship, and the hundred digit is 6 is the mid-range" has become the common law of both tacitly. In CPU products, whether it is "i9" or "Ryzen9", even consumers who do not understand technology can understand the performance relationship between different models of products.
However, if you think the same rules work in the smartphone space, you're likely to "fall into the pit." Because although the products positioned in the high-end to flagship positioning are very "clear" and "well-behaved" in the naming, there are some products in the entry-level market, and their names and actual product performance are actually not exactly in line.
Snapdragon 680 and Tianji 810, they are a bit "unworthy of the name"
Among these "unworthy" SoCs, the Snapdragon 680 is a more typical one. Released in the fourth quarter of 2021, this product is Qualcomm's latest model of 4G SoC, but if you don't know its specific configuration, the first reaction may be to think that it is a successor to the Snapdragon 675 or Snapdragon 678.
But in fact, whether from the CPU architecture or the layout of the size of the core, the Snapdragon 680 is actually not at all like inheriting the design of the Snapdragon 675, or even more like the "modern remake" of the Snapdragon 660 and the Snapdragon 665. At the same time, the architecture and design of Snapdragon 675 and Snapdragon 678 are obviously inherited by Snapdragon 690 and Snapdragon 695. This means that in the product line of the Snapdragon 6 series, there are currently two independent "technology trees", but their product names are intertwined, and it has to be said that it is somewhat puzzling.
However, a similar situation is not only happening on Qualcomm's side, but also in MediaTek's entry-level Tianji product line.
As early as 2020, we sanyi life pointed out in relevant content that "Tianji 800U" is not so much a "simplified version" of Tianji 800 in terms of internal code name or architectural design, but rather a high-frequency version of Tianji 720. In 2021, the name of Tianji 810 looks more confusing, but in fact, from the internal code name and GPU configuration, it is not difficult to find that it is actually an improved version of Tianji 700, and has nothing to do with Tianji 800 and Tianji 820.
Why is that? Cost and marketing strategies may be the main reasons
Compared to flagship markets, where there are usually only one or two product updates per year, and the naming and positioning between products are quite clear, each entry-level SoC product line usually presents two major characteristics.
The first is that the product line is significantly more complex and lengthy. In the same architecture, flagship chips may be sold for a year, but entry-level SoCs will often derive many "variants" according to different main frequencies, different size core specifications, and even different GPU computing power, and many entry-level models will exist in the market for several years.
Second, the naming of entry-level products sometimes does seem less "regular". For example, as mentioned earlier, the phenomenon that the actual specifications of models that look larger in numbers are not necessarily higher will never appear in the flagship products of each family, but it has appeared several times in the entry-level SoC.
So why is that? The first thing to say is that cost can be a very important factor. As we all know, the price of high-end mobile phones is higher, and this not only means that they can use better chips, better screens, better camera modules, and better processes, but also means that they can have a greater "fault tolerance" rate in the selection of these components.
For example, if a flagship chip is found to be unconventional in the production process, then the chip is likely to be directly abandoned, and its production cost will be "shared" by other qualified products. Obviously, this actually means that for flagship chips, although a lower yield rate will increase the final product price, it is not completely unacceptable.
But when the same situation occurs on the entry-level chip, the manufacturer may have to consider it, if the unqualified chip is only the frequency can not reach the design index, then it is likely to be made into a lower frequency derivative. In this way, the unqualified chip itself will not become a sunk cost, but will "shine" in the new, lower-priced mobile phone, thus alleviating the cost pressure for entry-level products that are not expensive.
Furthermore, it is not difficult to find out throughout the market today that the price range of high-end flagship models has been very large, basically from three or four thousand yuan to more than 10,000 yuan, and the use of the same flagship SoC may be used. But for entry-level products, a price reduction from 1500 yuan to 1200 yuan may mean a large hardware configuration change. Because of this, entry-level mobile phone SoCs must have more "subdivided models" to cope with the cost constraints of related products.
The "digital bigger" chip model, coupled with the pin tip size of the "multi-camera", the entry-level model can be quite a few pits
However, once there are many subdivided versions of the chip, sometimes the corresponding product name may be "messed up". And we can't rule out that sometimes this slightly confusing product naming method may be a bit of a deliberate ingredient in the manufacturer. After all, compared with the target user base of flagship products, consumers of entry-level models are often relatively less familiar with technology and configuration.
In this case, these entry-level SoCs, which are larger in numbers but not so high in actual configuration, will be somewhat objectively misleading to consumers.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】