Join the 4nm "battlefield", Apple upgrade the mobile phone core "Three Kingdoms Kill"

Southern Finance all-media reporter Jiang Yue reported that on the mobile phone SoC chip, Apple is staging a "Three Kingdoms Kill" with Qualcomm and MediaTek. Following Qualcomm and MediaTek's successive "beach grabbing" 4-nanometer processes in December last year, Apple may keep up this year, but it needs to pay a higher price.

News broke on January 17 that Apple's A16 processor for the next-generation iPhone had been finalized and would use a 4nm process. According to the news, Apple selected taiwan's wafer foundry TSMC to take over this difficult product, and accepted the latter's price increase requirements in order to compete for production capacity.

4 nm process controversy

The full name of soC chip is System on a Chip, that is, a monolithic system, which is a chip that integrates processors, memory, analog chips, etc., and has quite a "turnkey" function for mobile phone manufacturers. In other words, the performance of current smartphones is greatly dependent on the technical level of SoC chips. The 4-nanometer chip is considered by the market to be a major "magic weapon" for mobile phone manufacturers to compete for market share.

When Apple launched the latest generation of the iPhone 13 series last September, the 4-nanometer phone SoC had not yet come out. But then in December, Qualcomm and MediaTek scrambled to market with their latest generation of mobile phone SoCs using a 4nm advanced process, named "Snapdragon 8 Gen1" and "Tianji 9000" respectively.

This means that this year, there will be a batch of mobile phones equipped with 4-nanometer chips on the market, and the iPhone 13 series may be in the market competition, and the former may poach consumers who want to try new technologies.

In order to keep the market, Apple really has to work hard. If A16 does put the 4nm process into reality, it may be able to retain consumers to wait for the next new product launch.

What exactly has changed with 4nm, and why is the market pursuing chips with the first base program? The answer can be found from the comparison of the two generations of products of Qualcomm and MediaTek by market evaluators. Qualcomm and MediaTek's previous generation of top-spec chips both used a 5nm process, but the latest 4nm chips will provide better power management and temperature control, improving performance in communications, photography, AI, gaming, audio, security and many other aspects.

In fact, maintaining a leading position on SoC chips can be said to be one of Apple's winning magic weapons over the years. Due to the use of the most advanced chip process in the market again and again, every time the iPhone is launched, it will be popular with consumers who are looking for performance improvement.

According to market research agency Counterpoint, from the fourth quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2021, Apple was the world's second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after South Korea's Samsung in almost every quarter (except the fourth quarter of 2020 and the second quarter of 2021), occupying a larger market share than brands such as Xiaomi, Vivo, and OPPO.

Will Apple fully core?

Founded in 1976 and with a history of 46 years in consumer electronics design, Apple is on the road to chip design. In addition to the competition and comparison with Qualcomm and MediaTek on the SoC, there are recent rumors that Apple is planning to develop its own baseband chip to further reduce its dependence on Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is a major player in the baseband chip industry, producing baseband components for the entire iPhone 13 series. However, in the second half of last year, Qualcomm said in public that it expects to obtain only 20% of the orders for the iPhone baseband after two years. This has further led the market to believe that Apple intends to replace procurement from third parties with self-developed chips.

Apple is an innovator in the consumer electronics market, in addition to being good at developing novel consumer electronics, it has also continuously expanded its coverage in the industrial chain in recent years. Traditionally, consumer electronics companies and chip design companies have formed the upstream and downstream supply and demand relationship, but Apple is increasingly inclined to integrate the design of terminals and the design of chips. This has led them to gradually end their cooperation with chip design manufacturers and become their "opponents".

In the early years, Apple may be regarded as a competitor of computer companies and mobile phone companies, but now, Apple competes with Qualcomm and MediaTek on mobile phone SoCs, competes with Intel, Nvidia and AMD on computer CPUs and GPUs, and will also compete for talent and technology on more kinds of chips.

Around the chip design, the recent market "talent war" is also underway. On January 6, Jeff Wilcox, Apple's former M1 chip design director, announced that he would leave Apple to go to Intel as a researcher and chief technology officer in the design engineering group, focusing on the client SoC architecture.