Lenovo set up a chip company Dingdao Zhixin 300 million yuan can smash how big a splash?

"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" (Beijing, reporter Guo Hui) news, with Lenovo recently injected 300 million yuan in Shanghai to establish Dingdao Zhixin, its recent and increasingly dense semiconductor investment actions finally had to "see the clouds and see the sun".

According to Tianyancha data, from the end of December 2021 to the end of January 2022, in less than a month, Lenovo has invested heavily in a number of semiconductor companies with Lenovo (Beijing) Co., Ltd. as the main body, including chip manufacturing companies Shenzhen Yixin Information Technology Co., Ltd., Dongguan Memory Storage Technology Co., Ltd., and Cambrian Xingge. On January 17, Lenovo Group also invested a total of 800 million yuan in AI vision chip developer Aixin Yuanzhi with another investment entity, Lenovo Star.

According to the incomplete statistics of StarMine data, Lenovo has participated in at least 8 companies related to integrated circuits in 2021, including Jiehuate Microelectronics, Volta Semiconductor, Ruisi Zhixin, Fuhan Micro and other high-quality targets. The chip companies that Lenovo invested in earlier are more numerous, such as Cambrian, a listed company on the science and technology innovation board, and BYD Semiconductor, which has just passed the Meeting on the ChiNext Board.

Industry insiders observe and analyze that Lenovo's investment in various applications around the integrated circuit industry includes at least AI chips, CMOS chips, loT chips, 5G RF chips, IGBT chips, optical chips, single photon sensor chips, semiconductor laser chips, intelligent audio and video processing SoC chips and other fields.

At the beginning of October 2021, Lenovo Group lost the science and technology innovation board in the public opinion of "the attributes of science and technology are not strong". Lenovo has recently so frequently "invested in big booms" in different fields and links of semiconductors, what is the so-called demand, and is it forced by external pressure? Just when the market was in reverie, on January 26, Lenovo established a semiconductor company with a registered capital of 300 million yuan in Shanghai, Dingdao Zhixin, which seemed to have announced its determination to make cores.

He has released self-developed AI chips

"300 million yuan can't make a splash." After the above news came out, some market participants on the one hand were so depressed about Lenovo, on the other hand, they also lamented the reality of "it is difficult to make chips". One thing that many people overlook is that Lenovo released a "self-developed chip" on September 8, 2021, the eve of submitting the prospectus materials for listing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.

On September 8, 2021, Lenovo Group held the TechWorld Lenovo Innovation Technology Conference 2021, during which the latest technological achievements were announced: Lenovo LA2 Intelligent Embedded Controller.

Jia Zhaohui, senior vice president of Lenovo Group, said that the first LA2 intelligent embedded controller, independently designed and jointly developed by Lenovo, has an original heterogeneous multi-core hybrid architecture, supports sensor fusion, and realizes efficient and rapid intelligent perception and intelligent control, "The release of LA2 is a core technology breakthrough for Lenovo in the process of promoting the popularization of ultra-intelligent computers. ”

It is understood that the "LA2 embedded controller" is a non-core computing module installed in lenovo's savior computer brand products, with functions for intelligent recognition of external scenes, machine performance optimization and intelligent control. Based on the above introduction, many analysts bluntly said that its essence is an AI chip, in which the core NPU and CPU are coordinated to achieve an optimal balance between performance and power consumption.

Zhou Di, an expert at the Whale Platform think tank and a senior engineer of Fangrong Technology, said in an interview with the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily reporter: "Starting from the computer to do some non-core function development, although this is still a long way from the development of the core chip of the computer or even the mobile phone, it is a good path. ”

At present, among the smart hardware manufacturers, Xiaomi folds the soC chip of the mobile phone, and tries to balance the technology and differentiate the competition through the self-developed charging chip P1, image processing chip C1, etc., and accumulates the kinetic energy of the core; OPPO also chose to improve the image function of the mobile phone, and the self-developed special NPU chip - mariana MariSilicon X using the 6nm process.

In addition to "trying a small hand" on computer products, the other uses of Lenovo's self-developed AI chips are not clear, but considering that Lenovo intends to open up the high-end market for its own mobile phone brands in recent years, it will bring reverie to the outside world.

As early as the third quarter of 2020, Liu Jun, executive vice president of Lenovo Group and president of China, said that Lenovo will cover business customers through the Motorola brand in the future, and high-performance customers through the Savior series - especially game users.

In the second half of 2020, Lenovo released a Motorola mobile phone priced at up to 12499 yuan and a Pro version of the Savior E-sports mobile phone at 5999 yuan; by the end of December 2021, Lenovo even publicly "punched" Xiaomi, intercepting the Xiaomi 12 Qualcomm 4nm chip Snapdragon 8Gen 1 world premiere and releasing the Motorola EdgeX30.

From the perspective of conventional business strategy, high price does not mean high-end, and rushing to create topics is not a long-term solution. For the business customer base, breaking the advantages of Xiaomi, Huawei and even Apple from the brand, market and technology, forming a differentiated competition, while facing game users, to solve the problem of hardware performance and heat, AI chips may be able to take on this role.

Lenovo AI chips join hands with Cambrian?

To say that the manufacturers who have used AI chips for consumer electronics and "play out flowers" are difficult not to think of Huawei. In 2017, Huawei released the world's first mobile phone AI chip Kirin 970, which performed well.

Some analysts pointed out that this is the first time in the industry that a processing unit specifically used for artificial intelligence calculations has appeared in mobile phone chips, and the hardware computing acceleration capabilities of the neural network model have been integrated into the chip at the mobile device level.

The NPU module used in the Kirin 970 is from cambrian. Cambrian 1A processor was launched as early as 2016, the company's prospectus submitted on the science and technology innovation board disclosed that Huawei purchased Cambrian terminal intelligent processor IP in 2018 and was included in the flagship mobile phone chip, costing up to 114 million yuan.

On the one hand, there are Huawei AI chips such as Kirin 970 and other pearls in front, the outside world seems that Lenovo's self-developed LA2 intelligent embedded controller for its own intelligent hardware plan, is not surprising; on the other hand, Lenovo and Huawei AI chip NPU module supplier Cambrian relationship is not shallow.

In addition to Lenovo's investment in Cambrian Xingge (Nanjing) Technology Co., Ltd. in 2022, as early as July 2018, January and September 2019, Lenovo participated in cambrian pre-listing equity investment on three occasions.

According to the list of the top ten shareholders disclosed in Cambrian's 2021 semi-annual report, although Lenovo's figure is not seen, it is shown in the related party situation that the position of Cambrian supervisor is still held by Song Chunyu, a partner of Lenovo Venture Capital.

Lenovo Group CEO Yang Yuanqing said some time before the release of LA2 that the possibility of self-developed chips is not ruled out, nor does it rule out the possibility of cooperation with other partners. After the release of LA2, many analysts even pointed out that jia Zhaohui's joint development of LA2 with Lenovo may be Cambrian.

With the announcement in October 2018 of the adoption of the self-developed "Da Vinci Architecture" and the release of two self-developed cloud AI chips based on the "Da Vinci Architecture", Ascend 310 and Ascend 910, Cambrian's terminal intelligent processor IP licensing business in 2020 fell by 82.96% year-on-year.

Therefore, for Cambrian itself, relying on a smart hardware company to continue to promote the development of the above business and achieve a turnaround is also a "stable profit" business to some extent. Zhou Di analyzed that at present, cambrian major customers are mostly local governments and scientific research institutes, and the degree of marketization does need to be improved.

However, Bu Rixin, executive director of Chuangdao Consulting, believes that if Lenovo does AI chips, the best choice may be to buy IP from third-party independent IP vendors, and then develop it itself, rather than obtaining the authorization of AI chip companies. "NPU belongs to the core IP of AI chips, and there will be stability risks in the business model of authorized cooperation, especially if both partners have the needs of AI chip research and development."

When the reporter of the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily asked the Cambrian Board Office as an investor on the above matters, the other party did not immediately deny whether the two sides currently had project and technology development cooperation, but asked investors to take the later disclosure as the standard, and now it is temporarily impossible to give more information. As of press time, Lenovo Group has not responded.