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OPPO recently released a new mobile phone Find X5 series, one of which for the first time uses OPPO's self-developed image chip "Mariana MariSilicon X". Not only OPPO, in recent years, domestic mobile phones have launched self-developed chips. Huawei used its self-developed Kirin chip on its own mobile phone as early as 2014. In March 2021, Xiaomi released the self-developed image processing chip Surging C1. In September 2021, Vivo used its self-developed image chip V1 for the first time in the X70 series of mobile phones.
Why have domestic mobile phone manufacturers launched self-developed chips? Wang Bin, a senior analyst at Zhongcheng Think Tank, believes that Huawei's experience in restricting chip supply has made domestic mobile phone manufacturers enter the market for self-developed chips in 2021. The chip is the core component that mobile phones cannot avoid, and it is also the only way for major mobile phone manufacturers to get rid of constraints and achieve development and growth in the future. Only by mastering the autonomy of chip research and development can we participate in the rule-making of the future mobile phone market and have the right to speak in the industrial chain. Therefore, self-developed chips will definitely become the development trend of mobile phone manufacturers.
Zhong Xinlong, senior consultant of the Radio Research Institute of CCID think tank, said frankly that the current mobile phone market has entered the stock development period, and it is difficult for enterprises to easily enjoy the global dividends brought about by the rapid growth of the past market, and there are only two choices, either to go out of the road of differentiation, specialization and high-end, to get rid of the vicious competition of homogenization and low-end; or to turn to the product track of intelligent networked vehicles and seek new growth points.
"Judging from the changes in the external situation, market choices, and the situation upstream of the industrial chain, if you want to continue to maintain your core competitiveness in the mobile phone market that has entered a mature period, self-developed chips have become a compulsory course." Zhong Xinlong said.
As OPPO chief product officer Liu Zuohu said, if you want to really make valuable innovation, the only way is self-research, and it is to go deep into the communications, chips, materials of the bottom of the in-depth self-research, OPPO with in-depth self-development of chip design capabilities to break through the innovation bottleneck of smart phones, with key technologies to solve key problems.
The relevant person in charge of vivo also said that with the increase in consumer demand for mobile phone shooting, the computing power of mobile phones is facing the problem of large computing volume and high energy consumption. Especially in the night scene of complex light sources and when shooting videos, the amount of computing has increased exponentially, which puts forward higher requirements for the computing power of mobile phones. Traditional software solutions do not meet this need very well. At the same time, vivo has accumulated a lot of experience in introducing professional chips to upgrade the user experience. Therefore, the final method is adopted to cooperate with the main chip software algorithm through the self-developed image chip to achieve the combination of soft and hard to improve the user's image experience.
Why did domestic mobile phone manufacturers choose to launch self-developed image chips first, instead of system-level chips (SOCs) provided by Qualcomm and MediaTek for mobile phone manufacturers? Zhong Xinlong said that strengthening imaging has become the core competitiveness of the current mobile phone manufacturers to take differentiated competition, and the introduction of self-developed image chips will undoubtedly make mobile phone manufacturers more powerful.
Wang Bin introduced that the system-level chip is a collection of components such as the cpu CPU, the graphics processor GPU, the digital signal processor DPS, the neural processing unit NPU, the memory ROM/RAM, the baseband chip Modem, and the ISP image signal processor. Therefore, the threshold for making system-level chips is too high, and the technology stack required is too wide. Starting from the image chip, it is easier to be perceived by the user than other parts. Self-developed chips are a long road with extremely high trial and error costs, starting with chips that can intuitively improve image capabilities, and then considering system-level chips in the follow-up, which can lay a good foundation for mobile phone companies to enhance their future competitiveness.
"The road to self-developed chips is a long way to go, and from the initial investment to the continuous long-term iterative development, it requires massive funds." Is it to choose the conservative traditional OEM assembly model to obtain stable low-end profits, or to launch self-developed chips with high investment and high risk to shape the high-end image of the brand? This has become the choice faced by mobile phone manufacturers. Zhong Xinlong said.
(Economic Daily reporter Huang Xin)