According to CINNO Research data, in the Chinese smartphone SoC chip market in 2021, Fa Ge (MediaTek) and Qualcomm ranked in the top two with sales of 110 million and 106 million units, respectively. Fa Ge, who has been suppressed by Qualcomm for a long time, finally succeeded in taking the crown of the first place in the mobile phone chip market.
However, for Qualcomm, "high-end" will be its brand and the biggest advantage in the market, the market research agency CINNO Research shows that the domestic high-end flagship mobile phone of more than 6,000 yuan is still the fastest growing market for Qualcomm SoC chip share, the share increased to 10.1% in February this year, with a month-on-month growth rate of about 14.7%.
Without the Qualcomm Snapdragon competed by Huawei Kirin, it was so powerful that it convinced opponents.
Last year, domestic mobile phone manufacturers said the most words, "high-end" is bound to occupy a seat, frankly speaking, in the past MediaTek mobile phone chips in the high-end market is not a success, but since the launch of the Tianji series, there have been visible changes, especially the latest Tianji 9000 chips.
MediaTek's idea of making high-end chips has a long history, and the 10-core Helio X20 of that year won the title of "the world's first ten-core SoC mobile processor", but unfortunately, after the reputation, the product failed to shake Qualcomm's position in the high-end market.
Although MediaTek itself may not want to mention it, "cost performance" has indeed become MediaTek's most profound brand image and market competitiveness among many users.
This has changed with the advent of the 5G era. The beginning of the change is the new series name of "Tianji", compared with the "Helio" (later Chinese name: Helili) series launched for 4G networks, the Chinese name of the "Tianji" series can usher in the tastes of domestic consumers, plus the combination of naming methods with numbers, which is convenient for consumers to remember and understand.
The change in naming method can only be regarded as the icing on the cake, and the key is the progress of the product. In the past, MediaTek's chips were always "a little bit worse" in architecture or process process, and there was more or less a gap with the Snapdragon next door.
And these regrets were made up on the Tianji 9000.
In terms of core CPU, the Tianji 9000 adopts a new architecture Arm v9 for the next 10 years, with a three-cluster architecture design of 1 Cortex-X2 super core (3.05GHz) + 3 Cortex-A710 large cores (2.85GHz) + 4 Cortex-A510 small cores (1.8GHz). And MediaTek for the Tianji 9000 with a full blood 8MB level three cache, and the maximum support of 7500Mbps LPDDR5x memory specifications, can give full play to the performance of the whole machine. In terms of process, Tianji 9000 debuted TSMC's most advanced 4nm technology, which is even better in energy efficiency performance.
This time, the Tianji 9000 is on par with the Snapdragon 8 in terms of architecture, and even has a slight lead in the process of process. Does the strength of the Tianji 9000 chip itself inevitably mean that MediaTek is favored in the high-end market? Objectively speaking, not necessarily!
Perhaps because of the impact of TSMC's 4nm process mass production time, the model equipped with the Tianji 9000 chip was not released until the end of February, and so far only OPPO Find X5 Pro Tianji Version, Redmi K50 Pro, vivo X80 and vivo X80 Pro (Tianji 9000 Edition) and other four models equipped with Tianji 9000 chips were launched, of which the cheapest price was also set at 2999 yuan in one step.
The pricing strategy of mobile phone manufacturers to exchange price for volume is understandable, but for MediaTek and Tianji 9000, which want to improve market positioning, this is not an absolutely good thing.
In contrast, at present, OPPO, Samsung, Glory, iQOO, Nubia, Red Magic, Xiaomi and other brands have launched flagship models equipped with Snapdragon 8 chips, with a total of more than 20 models. In today's serious "inner volume", the starting price of the model equipped with Snapdragon 8 has to be set at 3299 yuan, but there are also many models equipped with Snapdragon 8 whose prices continue to rise to 6000, 7000 yuan, and even the glory Magic V of 10,000 yuan.
At this stage, Qualcomm Snapdragon chips undoubtedly have more pricing advantages in the high-end market, and manufacturers are more enthusiastic about using them in high-end products.
Regardless of the time, quantity and price of the launch of the corresponding terminals, we must admit that there is still a huge gap between the Tianji 9000 and the Snapdragon 8. This stems from the above-mentioned TSMC 4nm mass production factor, but more often than not, the gap between the MediaTek brand and Qualcomm, which is especially obvious in the high-end market.
In the past 10 years, the high-end flagship market of Android mobile phones is basically Qualcomm Snapdragon and Huawei Kirin, Snapdragon chips are even the only choice in the open market, and MediaTek, whether it is the past Helio or today's Tianji, gives people more impressions or "cost-effective", which is the advantage of MediaTek standing in the market, but also the shackles that limit its impact on the high-end.
From our previous experience of the corresponding mobile terminal, this year's Tianji 9000 chip itself has indeed "become", just want to open up its own space in the high-end market, Tianji 9000 is just the beginning, and the follow-up Fage still needs long-term continuous product research and development and brand communication.
The gradual strengthening of Tianji is not only beneficial to Fa Ge and mobile phone manufacturers, but also the majority of consumers with more choices are the biggest winners.