At the time of the iPhone 13 series of big sales, the various revelations of the iPhone 14 are still eye-catching. Some time ago, including "Apple breaking news professional household" Guo Mingxi and many other whistleblowers said that in the future, the iPhone 14/14 Max will continue to use A15 chips, only the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max upgrades to use the A16 chip, and then there is news that Apple will still be equipped with A16 chips in iPhoen14 to avoid controversy, but this A16 chip still uses the A15 architecture, the product of the revision of the frequency, and the real A16 is renamed A16 Pro。
Don't rush to laugh at Apple, in fact, this is really not Apple's first, in fact, last year's Android market popular Snapdragon 870, it is on the basis of Qualcomm's previous generation of flagship Snapdragon 865, by changing the process and improving the frequency, and in the new models released this year, Xiaomi 12X, Redmi 40S and other models are still equipped with this chip, a core battle for three years, which is unimaginable in the case of the previous generation. The core reason behind this is actually the reduction in the update speed of the overall chip industry, and Moore's Law has slowed down.
The trident fails, and the performance of the chip is accelerated and reduced
Architecture iteration, process upgrades, design manufacturer optimization, has always been the trident of mobile phone chip performance improvement, but also let the mobile phone flagship chip in the past few years to maintain about 50% or even higher performance growth in each iteration, but with the improvement of technology, coupled with the mundane affairs of ARM over the years, Samsung, TSMC process iteration speed decreased. The kinetic energy of the chip speed increase has been significantly reduced. Although Qualcomm's initial performance in the Snapdragon 888 era has also increased by 50% compared with the Snapdragon 865, its overly aggressive strategy has also won it the reputation of "Fire Dragon". In the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 era, its million running points were only less than 20% higher than the Snapdragon 888.
The speed reduction of the iPhone's A series chips is more obvious, taking the standard version as an example, the iPhone 11 is 58% higher than the iPhone X, and to the iPhone 12, its increase is only 17%, and now the hot-selling iPhone 13, its chip improvement is only 9%.
The speed increase is greatly reduced, which makes the previous generation flagship, or even the previous generation of flagship, still have a good combat effectiveness, and its performance can just fill the gap between the new generation of flagship chips and mid-range chips, which is a good way to fill the gap between the chip layout.
Open source saves money and simplifies the product line
With the improvement of the process and the complexity of the process, this not only makes the design of the chip become complicated, but also every time the tape and mass production, the manufacturer has to pay a huge amount of money, huge ability and long time. In this case, reducing the number of chips developed and produced, prolonging the service life of the chip, you can dilute the cost of chip research and development and development. In the past, Qualcomm will fully bloom in the high and low sections when the new product is released, but last year, we saw qualcomm only promoting the flagship chip Snapdragon 888 and the mid-range chip Snapdragon 778, and the Snapdragon 870 in the sub-flagship position was upgraded by the previous generation of Snapdragon 865, and even the low-end Snapdragon 680 also had thick traces of the previous generation of mid-range chip Snapdragon 765. In other words, flagship decentralization becomes sub-flagship, and mid-end decentralization becomes low-end. In this way, update and iteration work can be greatly reduced when performance meets the requirements.
Android moves up, Apple dives, and chips go the same way
For domestic manufacturers and even the entire Android Group, it is undoubtedly crucial to seize the high-end and upgrade the grade, especially in the era of chip shortage, ensuring the supply of high-end models has become the key. Therefore, we have seen that in the past two years, the release of high-end products is much higher than that of low-end products, everyone knows Snapdragon 888, Snapdragon 870, but the low-end Snapdragon 680 is not known. From this, we can also see the appeal of high-end chips. Of course, the high price also hinders the popularity of flagship chips. At this time, there is a high-end halo blessing, the performance is also good, the key is that the cheap previous generation of flagship upgrades have a good chance to appear.
For Apple, the strategy of one generation and one core also makes it slightly embarrassing, especially for the performance party, the performance difference is small, making them less willing to buy high-end models. In the iPhone 13 era, Apple used a castrated version of the A15 chip in the basic version of the iPhone 13. In this case, if the previous generation of chips is used, it can better reflect the difference between the basic version and the Pro version, and can better highlight the advantages of the new chip, which makes high-end products more attractive to consumers.
Different purposes, but the same destination, have extended the life of the previous generation of chips.