At two o'clock in the morning of Beijing time on the 9th, Apple held a new product launch conference in the spring of 2022, announcing the new color of the iPhone 13 series: the green of the iPhone 13 Pro/Max and the green of the iPhone 13/mini.
It has become "green", and it has also changed stronger. In the early morning of March 9, Apple's 2022 spring conference came to an end, including the new color of the iPhone 13 series, the new iPhone SE and the new iPad Air, including a number of new products, officially entered the public vision.
As can be seen from the preview, the theme of this conference is "high-energy transmission". Such a flaunted flaunting, naturally indispensable to the protagonist iPhone 13 help: since its release last year, its market performance has been strong, first in short supply, and then for many consecutive months to the top of the Chinese smartphone market, and now the new color matching launched, will also bring a wave of sales for the iPhone 13 in the market.
Since the beginning of the A4 chip, Apple's mobile phone chip has always been at the top of the mobile processor list, so that Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek have struggled to catch up. But from 2019 onwards, MediaTek Tianji series of 5G chips began to explode, Tianji 800, Tianji 820, Tianji 1000, many series have achieved great success, and after the advent of the world's first 4nm mobile phone chip, and then today's Tianji 9000, it is expected that MediaTek's new flagship model will also usher in a new wave of attention in the market.
MediaTek said that the newly launched Tianji 9000 chip has the performance comparable to the A15 chip on the iPhone 13/Pro.
MediaTek, the once forgotten name, has returned to people's vision in recent years. At the MediaTek Executive Summit held in the United States on November 19 last year, the company officially announced the new flagship product of its mobile terminal processor, the Tianji 9000, which won the limelight with strong performance, luxurious stacking, and the use of TSMC's 4nm process.
The phone equipped with the Tianji 9000 processor was released in February 2022. Can MediaTek return with this processor king? Let's first turn the perspective back to 7 years ago to see what MediaTek experienced in the last battle for the high-end processor crown on mobile.
MediaTek's official website introduces the Tianji 9000
"One core is difficult, nine cores are watching"
MediaTek in the early years was a company that made DVD built-in chips, and then caught up with the golden period of 2G mobile phone development in Chinese mainland, and won wide acclaim by providing a turnkey solution of "bag check-in" for cottage mobile phone manufacturers, and then sat firmly in the position of the boss of the low-end "thousand yuan machine" processor in the era of smart phones.
Nokia Cottage Machine
However, in the high-end mobile phone processor market with higher gross profit margin, the veteran manufacturer Qualcomm has always been in a monopoly position. In 2015, after accumulating years of technical strength, MediaTek launched its first processor positioned in the high-end market, named after the ancient Greek sun god Helio series, Chinese named Helio.
The first product, Helio X10, met with Qualcomm's flagship product, the Snapdragon 810 at the time. Previously, Qualcomm's Snapdragon series was a monopoly in the Android market, especially the flagship Snapdragon 8 series processor, which had an absolute dominance in the high-end market.
However, the so-called "arrogant soldiers must be defeated", Qualcomm in the self-developed Kryo architecture is not going well, for the 810 processor hastily selected the then immature four A57 large core + four A53 small core big.LITTLE public ARM program. At that time, the 20nm process could not support the terrible heat generated by the simultaneous operation of 4 A57 large cores - which directly made the Snapdragon 810 its first processor to be named "Fire Dragon", and its performance was very bad.
MediaTek's Helio X10 adopted a more conservative plan, with 8 A53s composed of "true eight cores" as a selling point, achieved good results, and caught Qualcomm off guard.
In the chip ranking in the first half of 2016, MediaTek's Helio X10 has a higher market share than the Snapdragon 810, which has a lot to do with its extremely high cost performance.
However, although the entry timing of the Helio X10 is quite good, MediaTek itself is not contentious: not only will the hot flagship X10 processor "sell" to the Redmi Note2, which is priced at only 799 yuan, smash the sign of the "high-end processor", but also on its successor Helio X20, it has made almost the same mistake as the Qualcomm 810, manufacturing a ten-core processor with a 20nm process, and the operating frequency is very high, reaching 2.1Ghz.
MediaTek sold the Helio X10 to the 100-yuan mobile phone Redmi Note2, and smashed the sign of "high-end processor" itself
The results speak for themselves. Helio X20 in a long period of high load operation, the processor heat is huge, had to lock the core to reduce the frequency, until all the load, are left to the last big core that has been overwhelmed, forming a so-called "one core is difficult, nine cores are watching" situation. And the bonus of ten cores has not brought much performance improvement to it, and it is even inferior to the Qualcomm 820, which has only four cores in the running score.
MediaTek's Helio X20 overall score was lower than the Qualcomm 820
After the huge failure of the Helio X20, although MediaTek still launched the Helio X30 after that, only Meizu was willing to adopt it. Moreover, the performance of the Helio X30 is not ideal, only supporting the baseband level of cat.12, lagging behind Qualcomm's cat.16 and Huawei's cat.17 at that time. Not to mention that at the time, the Helio X30 was competing with one of Qualcomm's most successful works in recent years, the Snapdragon 835 processor equipped with the "Nail Household" Xiaomi 6.
MediaTek's Helio X30 and Snapdragon 835 are far apart
Under various unfavorable factors, with the reconciliation of the relationship between MediaTek's "hardcore" customer Meizu and Qualcomm, the last manufacturer willing to use MediaTek's flagship processor also abandoned it, and its first journey to hit the high-end came to an end.
After that, MediaTek experienced a gap in the field of high-end chips for nearly 3 years. Chairman Cai Mingjie was painfully determined, and invited Cai Lixing, who had been "hand-picked" by TSMC Chairman Zhang Zhongmou as TSMC's successor and was later deposed, to serve as CEO and deeply cultivate the P series of low-end mobile processors.
MediaTek Chairman Tsai Mingjie
Although MediaTek has gradually faded from the eyes of the Chinese people, the strategy of focusing on 4G chips has brought a broad market to many underdeveloped overseas areas, making the company surpass Qualcomm for the first time in smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2020, becoming the champion, and sitting on the throne of the first market share of the global mobile phone processor market for five consecutive quarters.
Such achievements have given MediaTek the confidence to launch another impact on flagship processors. At the end of 2019, it released a new high-end series product line, the Dimesity "Tianji" series. The first Tianji 1000 and the later revamped Tianji 1200 have gained a good reputation in the market, although the performance is still not strong enough, it is classified into the "sub-flagship" of the 2000 yuan price segment, but there is no large-scale "overturning" phenomenon.
Obviously, MediaTek is much more cautious this time, and it is also waiting for an opportunity. On the Qualcomm side, with the Us paper ban making Huawei HiSilicon's Kirin 9000 processor a masterpiece, and the Snapdragon 865 received wide acclaim in the market, Qualcomm seemed to be proud again as 7 years ago, and launched a "fire dragon" processor comparable to Snapdragon 810 - Snapdragon 888. At this point, the opportunity that MediaTek has been waiting for for many years has finally arrived.
Tianji 1200 and Kirin 9000 and Snapdragon 888 compete on the same stage
Tianji 9000 completes beyond
Right now, just as it was at that moment.
MediaTek has launched its "decisive battle" of tianji 9000, which has been secretly developed for 2 years. Although Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 with the same Arm v9 architecture a month later to fight back, the Samsung 4nm process it decided to use made everyone suspicious.
According to the data released by the media, the transistor density extreme value that can be achieved by the 4nm LPE process is 137.04 MTr/mm2; the specific data of TSMC's 4nm N4 process transistor density, although there is no statistics, the official said that there will be a 6% increase compared with N5.
The transistor density announced by N5 is 171.3 MTr/mm2, so the transistor density of the N4 process is 24.5% higher than that of Samsung 4nm, which is reflected in the chip, which is a great increase in chip efficiency and a decrease in energy consumption. Samsung's 4nm process is only similar to TSMC's 7nm level.
Although in the relevant running score test, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and MediaTek Tianji 9000 two processor scores have exceeded the million mark, but a closer look can be found that a large part of the composition of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 score falls on Qualcomm's traditional strength GPU.
In Antutu's running score test, qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and MediaTek Tianji 9000 scores both exceeded the million mark.
According to the data released by the professional evaluation website, in the Geek Bench 5 test focusing on CPU performance, the energy efficiency ratio of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 CPU is even lower than that of the previous generation of The Snapdragon 888, and the full CPU power consumption reaches 11 watts - this data is even close to the low-power notebook CPU.
At the same time, the CPU multi-core performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is only about 1.5% higher than that of the Snapdragon 888, and the single-core performance is only 5.7%. In the Geek Bench 5 test, the multi-core score of the Tianji 9000 engineering machine is 17% higher than that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and even surpasses Apple's A14; the energy efficiency ratio is 25% higher than that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which is still under the premise that the large and medium core frequencies of the Tianji 9000 are higher than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and the test is used in the heat dissipation component of the very primitive engineering machine.
The Geekbench 5 CPU performance test of the Tianji 9000 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the Tianji 9000 performed prominently. / Source b station @ Geekerwan
It can be seen from this that Samsung's 4nm process is "unwashed", and it is more expected that the real machine equipped with the Tianji 9000 processor will perform.
Of the three Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phones released so far, two are e-sports phones that focus on heat dissipation. It can be seen how much effort manufacturers have spent in order to control such a "big fire dragon". Not only that, the Tianji 9000 is also equipped with a maximum of 8MB of L3 cache supported by Cortex-X2 super nuclear power, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is only equipped with 6MB.
Architecture comparison of The Tianji 9000 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. / Source b station @ Geekerwan
L3 cache is a bridge between CPU and memory, which is a huge improvement for game scenarios with frequent I/O. It is widely believed that the cache configuration of the "full blood version" can alleviate MediaTek's shortcomings in the GPU and bring a good performance to the Tianji 9000 in the game.
In the game test of "Original God", the real-time frame rate of Tianji 9000 is not much different from that of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and it can even gain an advantage in energy consumption ratio. / Source b station @ Geekerwan
At the same time, Tianji 9000 has also completed the adaptation of LPDDR5X memory, supporting up to 7500MHz, preparing for the main model equipped with LPDDR5X memory in the second half of this year. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, on the other hand, only supports LPDDR5 up to 3200 MHz.
In summary, compared with Qualcomm, although there are still some shortcomings in gpus, baseband, ISP (image processor) and other aspects, on the whole, it is already a very good system-level chip (SoC). The biggest problem that MediaTek is facing now is probably chip production capacity.
Review bloggers have a very high rating for Tianji 9000 / Source b Station @ Geekerwan
Strong enemies forced production ahead of schedule
Although the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was released a month later than the Tianji 9000, because Samsung's 4nm production capacity is very sufficient, the mobile phone equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 can be shipped in advance and officially released in January this year. The TSMC 4nm production capacity used by the Tianji 9000 is now a position that major manufacturers around the world are competing for, especially the improvement of the process N4P, which was almost "wrapped up" by Apple last year to produce the A16 chip on the iPhone 14.
In addition, AMD's next-generation CPU, as well as the upgraded version of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus, are all eyeing TSMC's 4nm process. Recently, it has even been reported that Qualcomm urgently contacted TSMC, hoping to put the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus that was originally scheduled to be put into production in the second half of the year, which shows that Tianji 9000 has given Qualcomm great pressure, but it is also facing a severe production capacity bottleneck.
According to foreign media reports, Qualcomm plans to launch the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus processor in the second half of this year, saying that "the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus may be earlier than we think."
But at least on the Tianji 9000, we saw MediaTek's reflection in the last high-end war, and its determination to build a flagship mobile phone processor without shortcomings - after all, MediaTek's chip has surpassed Qualcomm so much, and it is the first time in history.
Interestingly, the naming of the Tianji 9000 is similar to hiSilicon's Kirin 9000 processor. In the future, can MediaTek inherit the glory of HiSilicon chips before they were banned? What kind of counterattack will Qualcomm make? Let's wait and see.
Author | Horse dot autumn
Responsible Editor | Wu Yangyu
South Wind Window's international new media