Tianji 9000, a mobile phone chip that has not yet been listed in the sky.
"It's been a long time since a chip has been so exciting."
In 2020, Huawei launched the Kirin 9000, which is known as the "Absolute Song", and this year, also called "9000", the Tianji 9000 from Taiwan is like a spiritual sequel, inheriting the will of Kirin.
MediaTek Tianji 9000, a mobile phone chip that has not yet been listed in the sky.
Without him, the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that has long been sought after by mobile phone manufacturers (Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1) has serious problems - high heat generation and high power consumption. Both chips are Qualcomm's highest-end mobile phone chips, appearing on almost all Android manufacturers' flagship models.
For users, the advantages and disadvantages of the chip are closely related to the daily use experience, no one wants to spend 5 or 6 thousand yuan to buy the mobile phone is easy to heat, the battery life is still poor; and for domestic mobile phone manufacturers, Qualcomm's "crotch" makes their already unsmooth high-end road, and a step slower.
Manufacturers and users are "bitter Qualcomm for a long time", and the chip factory MediaTek, which is jokingly called "Fa Ge", has taken over the user's expectations. There is no doubt that 2022 will be a pivotal year for the chip company.
Can't get rid of the low-end MediaTek
Contrary to Qualcomm's entry into the mobile phone industry, MediaTek's origin in the mobile phone market is a copycat mobile phone.
In 2003, a few years before the rise of domestic mobile phones, MediaTek launched a one-stop TurnKey Solution turnkey mobile phone solution in that year. To put it simply, after the mobile phone manufacturer purchases this solution, it only needs to assemble the screen, camera, shell, keyboard and other components to launch the finished mobile phone.
Therefore, this solution greatly reduces the production cycle and cost of mobile phones, and wins the support of many domestic "cottage machine" manufacturers for MediaTek, and the brand "MTK" (MediaTek English abbreviation) has also begun to be widely known in the Chinese market.
In 2011, the wave of smart phones has become overwhelming, all mobile phone manufacturers are transforming, MediaTek, as a chip factory in the era of functional machines, will obviously not miss this round of feast.
In 2012, MediaTek released a quad-core MT6589 chip, which set a number of industry firsts in terms of communication baseband, graphics processing, energy consumption ratio, etc., and the cheap price also allowed mobile phone manufacturers to purchase, and quad-core mobile phones began to be rapidly popularized in the thousand-yuan machine market.
A year later, MediaTek brought the world's first octa-core processor, the MT6592, which also swept the market.
Like domestic mobile phone manufacturers in recent years, after standing firm in the low-end market, MediaTek began to impact Qualcomm's strategic hinterland - the high-end market.
In 2015, MediaTek launched the Helio X series, officially impacting the high-end market. However, although the Helio X10 is positioned at the high end, it has suffered a double blow in performance and the market. Not only is the basic configuration not prominent, but also because MediaTek has set up a core-locking scheduling mechanism, Helio X10 has a situation of "one core is difficult, seven cores are watching".
On the other hand, although HTC, Meizu and other manufacturers have also used it on their own high-end flagship models, the Redmi Note 2, which costs less than 1,000 yuan, quickly dragged it into the low-end market.
Redmi (the current Redmi brand) is inexpensive and has a huge shipment volume, even if MediaTek does not want its chips to be involved in the low-end market, it cannot be completely abandoned. Therefore, whenever MediaTek's front foot just releases a "high-end" chip, the back foot will fall to Redmi to pull it back to the thousand-yuan machine market.
To this day, MediaTek has not escaped this situation.
But things are starting to change this year.
A rare opportunity
Domestic mobile phone manufacturers from 2020 onwards, invariably go all out to impact the high-end market. On the core mobile phone SoC, in addition to Huawei's own Kirin chip, other manufacturers only have Qualcomm and MediaTek two chip factories to choose from.
MediaTek lacks enough appeal in the high-end market because of its own brand and chip performance problems, so their common choice is Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series processors.
In the past, Qualcomm was not without problems, and the 2015 commercial Snapdragon 810 was also known as the "Fire Dragon", with high heat and high power consumption, just like today. But Qualcomm quickly solved the problem on the next generation Snapdragon 820, so it didn't cause much damage.
But this time Qualcomm was not as lucky as the last time, last year's Snapdragon 888 and this year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, two successive generations of flagship chips have the same high heat, high power consumption.
Last year, MediaTek's highest-end chip was the Tianji 1200, although it did not have the obvious problems of the Snapdragon 888, but the performance was much inferior to the Snapdragon 888. Therefore, after weighing, manufacturers still chose snapdragon 888 and piled up heat dissipation on mobile phones in an attempt to alleviate the heat problem.
But this year, according to the prototype test of the evaluation agency, the performance of the Tianji 9000 has been greatly improved compared with the previous generation, which is comparable to the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, but the heat and power consumption are much lower than that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
For users and vendors, there used to be no choice, but now they have a new choice. For MediaTek, this is also a rare opportunity.
However, what is in front of MediaTek is not just a simple matter of "idle fish turning over".
Teammates don't give strength is the key
In 2022, MediaTek's first step towards the high end began with OPPO.
On February 24, OPPO released the Find X5 series, and the OPPO Find X5 Pro Version equipped with The Tianji 9000 was also released worldwide at the press conference. OPPO obviously also understands MediaTek's intentions, find X5 Pro Tianji edition only has a 12GB + 256GB large memory version, priced at 5799 yuan - this is almost the highest priced mobile phone equipped with MediaTek chips ever.
However, compared with the OPPO Find X5 Pro of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 version, the Tianji 9000 version lacks OPPO's first self-developed NPU chip Mariana X, and the imaging system has also shrunk. However, this was not deliberately done by OPPO.
Li Jie, general manager of oppo Find product line, said in an interview with ZAKER Technology and other media that as the first product to debut Tianji 9000, if you want to impact the high-end, you must not cause problems in product experience or word of mouth because of the impulse or low price. "So in addition to the two devices on the Find X5 Pro Tianji edition that can't be adjusted in real time, flagship configurations such as IP68 waterproof and dustproof, top screen, etc., are all installed on the Find X5 Pro Tianji edition."
In short, tuning Qualcomm's chips has taken a lot of time, and the resources allocated to MediaTek can only be less.
In fact, this is not a situation unique to oppo alone. All along, models equipped with MediaTek chips have tended to be slower in system updates than Qualcomm's version, and the number of updates has been less, including Xiaomi (including Redmi), which has the most frequent system updates.
The reason is not only the problem of resource allocation, but more importantly, MediaTek is mostly low-end models, manufacturers lack the patience of high-end machines in maintenance, and optimization is not as good as Qualcomm models.
Therefore, the Ability of Tianji 9000 to be strong is only the first step in its competition with Snapdragon. Whether this Taiwanese manufacturer can take this "soaring into the sky" also depends on whether the follow-up teammates will also be like OPPO, giving "Fa Ge" a chance to climb to the high end.
In particular, whether it can control the red rice of the past, the current Redmi, not to be dragged into the abyss of the low end, will be a major challenge for MediaTek.
Produced by ZAKER Technology
Text / Liu Fan