#头条创作挑战赛 #
Wen | Zhou Wenbin
8155 made Qualcomm win numb, driving the automotive business into a new stage.
On September 23, Qualcomm held its inaugural Auto Investor Conference, and its total valuation of auto orders has grown to $30 billion due to the popularity of Snapdragon digital chassis solutions in the automotive industry.
You know, when Qualcomm released its third-quarter earnings report in July, the total valuation of its auto business orders exceeded $19 billion, that is, in just two months, Qualcomm's order valuation increased by more than $10 billion.
In addition to the rapid growth in the total value of orders in the automotive business, Qualcomm also announced several important developments.
For example, due to the strong revenue growth momentum of QCT's automotive business, Qualcomm expects this revenue to grow from $975 million in fiscal 2021 to $1.3 billion (expected revenue) in fiscal 2022; in addition, Qualcomm also raised its revenue growth forecast for QCT's automotive business released in November 2021 - revenue will exceed $4 billion (expected revenue) in fiscal 2026 and more than $9 billion (expected revenue) in fiscal 2031.
Qualcomm expects the potential market size of the company's automotive business to grow to $100 billion by 2030.
Qualcomm's revenue in fiscal 2021 was $33.566 billion, and revenue in the first half of fiscal 2022 was $21.869 billion, compared with only 3.21% of revenue in the third quarter of this year.
That is to say, within a decade, Qualcomm hopes that the automotive business can support one-third of the country.
The other side of Qualcomm is the decline of consumer electronics business, from the third quarter of this year's financial report, Qualcomm's mobile phone business revenue fell by 4.09% month-on-month. Qualcomm itself predicts that the growth of the mobile phone business will slow in the fourth quarter.
At a time of weak strong business demand, Qualcomm is trying to diversify from the automotive to the cloud server business, which is clearly the most promising of many new businesses. So, can the automotive business support Qualcomm's ambitions?
01 Cockpit chip in high spirits
In 2002, Qualcomm provided 2G connectivity for automobiles for the first time and officially entered the automotive industry.
Although the layout has been nearly 20 years, Qualcomm's automotive business has never attracted much attention under the aura of "mobile phone chips".
The change of events was at the beginning of January this year, Qualcomm officially demonstrated the "Snapdragon Digital Chassis" business system at the CES 2022 conference, which for the first time systematically demonstrated the overall solution for automobiles to the industry.
With this announcement, Qualcomm officially announced to the market its determination to expand its automotive business. But at this time, the automotive business accounts for less than 3% of Qualcomm's overall revenue.
In Qualcomm's planning, the automotive business is mainly divided into four directions: intelligent cockpit, vehicle networking, C-V2X, ADAS and automatic driving, and cloud-side terminal management. The "Snapdragon digital chassis" is actually to integrate these four directions into a set of open and scalable cloud connectivity tool platforms, and car manufacturers can independently select Qualcomm's products and technical capabilities as needed.
Therefore, the Snapdragon digital chassis also contains four major platforms, namely the Snapdragon Ride platform, the Snapdragon cockpit platform, the Snapdragon car intelligent connection platform and the Snapdragon car to cloud service, which correspond to the four directions of Qualcomm Automotive business.
At present, among the four major businesses, the best development is the Snapdragon digital cockpit platform.
At present, there are more than 20 models equipped with Snapdragon SA8155P in China, including the ideal L9, Weilai ET5, ET7, Xiaopeng P5, WM W6 and Zhiji L7 and so on. Judging from the delivery of these models, the "Snapdragon 8155" is running on the motherboards of hundreds of thousands of high-end models of their own brands.
The reason why the Snapdragon 8155 is popular is that the performance experience is good.
The intelligent cockpit is a general term for a series of interactive functions in the car, such as the entertainment audio and video system in the car, instrument display, driver monitoring, gesture recognition and so on. And most of these functions are finally implemented on a screen.
In 2012, Tesla Model S took the lead in adopting a 17-inch car display, and after that, the smart big screen began to become the object of the internal volume of major smart car brands.
For example, the HiPhi 1 is equipped with three screens in the car, the Roewe RX5 has a 27-inch 4K large screen, and the ideal L9 is in addition to the screen on the main passenger and steering wheel, adding an additional 15.7-inch small TV in the car.
Pictured: Roewe RX5 with fish screen
Many times, whether the car screen is large enough and large enough has become a measure of whether a car "looks" smart or not.
The problem is precisely here, with more and more cockpit functions in the car, more and more screens, higher and higher refresh rates, and the requirements for computing power in smart cockpits are getting higher and higher. More importantly, this kind of computing power is not the ability of one aspect, but the comprehensive ability of CUP, GPU, NPU and other aspects.
That is, the chip needed for a smart cockpit is not a special student, but a hexagonal warrior.
Specifically, the smart cockpit needs a heterogeneous chip with high computing power. But on the other hand, due to the rise of the complex demand for smart cockpits, which is the last three or four years, the maturity and popularity of heterogeneous chip technology are also the last three or four years, so there are not many products on the market that can meet the demand.
At present, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8155, which is sought after by almost all car companies, was released in 2019, using 7-nanometer technology, with 8 cores and 8 TOPS computing power, which can support up to 6 cameras, 4 2K screens, or 3 4K screens.
But compared with similar players, Nvidia's main smart cockpit chip Tegra X1 was released in 2015, using a 20nm process, GPU computing power of 512GFLOPS, less than half of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155; Although Samsung's Exynos V9 surpasses Qualcomm's computing power on the GPU, reaching 1205GFLOPS, the NPU computing power is only 1.9TOPS. Although the Longying No. 1 developed by China Core Qing Technology is not much different from Qualcomm in all aspects, it has not yet been mass-produced.
The reason why Qualcomm can gain advantages in the field of smart cockpit is mainly due to the long-term accumulation in the field of smart phones. The scenarios and computing requirements of smart cockpit are essentially the same as the scenarios and computing needs of smart phones.
For chip giants such as NXP and NVIDIA, they have either been engaged in the research and development of car chips before, or they are good at server and PC chip related products, so there is a lack of NOW-HOW on smart cockpit chips. The more important problem is that because the annual shipment of automobiles is about 6 million units, it is far from enough to dilute the cost of chip research and development and production, which also makes the corresponding enterprises lack development motivation.
Qualcomm differs in that the advantages of smartphones are not only technically mature enough, but also the huge shipments of smartphones to maximize the cost. Taking the Snapdragon 8155 as an example, its basic design comes from the Snapdragon 855 chip, which has previously been installed on flagship phones such as the Xiaomi Mi 9 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Note10.
Why do car companies choose Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155?
Shen Hui, founder, chairman and CEO of WM Motor, believes that "the advantage of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 is that it is an ARM processor architecture and has a mature adaptation to the Android system. At present, almost all car systems are also Android architecture, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 with the adaptability of chips and systems, as well as the openness and richness of software rapid rise. ”
For Qualcomm, there is not a single product on the market that can hit the smart cockpit chip. Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 has thus become the object of scramble from consumers to car companies.
In July, Polar Kr announced that the Polar Kr 0001 cockpit has been fully upgraded and will be free of charge for all users to upgrade the "8155 Intelligent Cockpit Computing Platform".
Before this, the Kryptonite 001 used Qualcomm's previous generation of intelligent cockpit chip 820A released in 2016, due to the lack of computing power, the Krypton 001 has been complained about by users, such as "hardware is full, software is silly", "from starting the vehicle to the car system response, it took 71 seconds", "comparable to Windows XP old computer boot" and so on.
After this upgrade, the Kikrypton 001 car machine wake-up only takes 2s, the cold start speed is increased by 3 times, the sliding frame rate is increased by 66.1%, the average opening time of the vehicle application is only 1.3s, and the fluency of the car machine is significantly improved.
This upgrade has naturally also received unanimous praise from users and has been on Weibo's hot search. By the beginning of September this year, Ford followed the action of Polar Krypton, saying that it would upgrade to the Qualcomm Snapdragon SA8155P chip for free for existing or soon-to-be users who purchased Ford Electric Horse.
Like the smartphone market, today's Qualcomm smart cockpit chips have been equated with high-end and flagships.
It can be said that Qualcomm's intelligent cockpit chip has also had a hegemonic weather in the field of mobile phones in the automotive market. With the help of smart cockpit chips, Qualcomm has also laid a solid nail in the automotive business.
02 Qualcomm Launches Total War?
Although Qualcomm has laid a solid foundation with chips in the field of smart cockpits, Qualcomm's challenges are still arduous from the perspective of the entire automotive business.
Unlike consumer electronics such as mobile phones, which usually only need a core of high-power CPUs, smart cars need thousands of chips large and small, which are mainly divided into three categories, including function chips, power semiconductors and sensors. Now everyone is more concerned, and the price is more expensive automatic driving chips, smart cockpit chips are functional chips.
As mentioned earlier, Qualcomm's layout in the automotive business has never been limited to the field of intelligent cockpit chips, but has started from the chip and rolled out to the entire automotive network and automatic driving. But the problem is that now there are mature competitors in the fields that Qualcomm intends to get involved in, and Qualcomm will face an all-out war.
For example, in the field of ADAS and automatic driving, Qualcomm released the automatic driving platform Snapdragon Ride in January 2020, which is planned to be mass-produced this year, this chip uses 5nm process and modular heterogeneous multi-core CPU/GPU, computing power 60TOPS, and the overall power consumption is about 10 to 20 times lower than similar solutions.
But in the field of self-driving chips, there are already giants such as NVIDIA, Intel and Mobileye in foreign countries; There are also star startups in China such as Horizon, Black Sesame, Cambrian and so on.
Among them, Nvidia's upcoming main chip Orin, using a 7nm process, has a computing power of 254TOPS; Huawei's 7nm chip Ascend 610 computing power also reached 200. In addition, among startups, Horizon has just officially announced a new round of financing closing. By the end of 2021, Horizon has signed more than 70 models of front-loading mass production fixed-point projects with more than 20+ car companies, and the cumulative shipment of Journey series chips has exceeded 1 million.
In addition to the strong enemy around, what is more important for Qualcomm is that unlike the intelligent cockpit chip, which is highly attached to the smartphone chip for development, the intelligent driving chip is an exclusive product for customized development of automobiles.
Although in April this year, Qualcomm invested 4.5 billion yuan to acquire the autonomous driving company Veoneer, completing the software algorithm capabilities in the field of automatic driving, but due to the late layout time, it also lagged behind Nvidia's long-term accumulation in ecology. Overall, Qualcomm does not have a unique advantage in autonomous driving.
In addition, even in the field of smart cockpit that Qualcomm is good at, you can't sit back and relax.
At present, there are not a few intelligent cockpit chips that may replace Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 in China, such as the "core of the cabin" X9 of Xinchi Technology, the journey 5 of Horizon, the Dragon Eagle One of Xinqing Technology and so on.
Therefore, in terms of smart cockpits, the competition that Qualcomm has to face is not in the present, but in the next few years. With the large number of domestic chips delivered, Qualcomm will face a more complex competitive environment in China, and 60% of Qualcomm's revenue comes from China.
Of course, Qualcomm still has its own unique advantages in the automotive business. Due to the long-term accumulation of technology in communications, Qualcomm's in-vehicle network connection and C-V2X are leading in the world from technology to market.
This part of the business includes Bluetooth in the car, Wi-Fi connection technology, high-precision positioning, 4G/5G connection technology, vehicle-road collaboration and other scenarios. Strategy Analytics predicts that nearly 75 percent of new cars will embed cellular technology by 2024. At present, Qualcomm ranks first in the global market share of vehicle networking, and more than 150 million vehicles in the world have adopted Qualcomm's vehicle networking solutions.
In terms of cloud-side terminal management, Qualcomm provides an integrated security and connected car service suite for the cloud platform for the Snapdragon intelligent cockpit and the Snapdragon 4G/5G platform. This business also has the same systematic advantage in the case of Qualcomm's intelligent cockpit and vehicle-mounted network services.
End of 03
Qualcomm has indeed come to the point where business transformation is needed.
In July, Qualcomm released its third-quarter financial report, with revenue of $10.936 billion, up 36% year-on-year; Net profit was $3.73 billion, up 84% year-on-year. But of these, more than 50% of the revenue comes from mobile phone chip-related business segments.
Photo: Phoenix Technology
Since the beginning of this year, the global smartphone market shipments have declined rapidly. IDC data shows that in the second quarter of 2022, mobile phone shipments in the Chinese market fell by 14.7% year-on-year. Expanding globally, Strategy Analytics expects global smartphone shipments to decline 7.8% year-over-year in 2022.
As the core component of smart phones, the mobile phone chip business has reached more than 50% of Qualcomm's revenue. Therefore, in the third quarter of this year, Qualcomm's mobile phone business revenue fell by 4.09% month-on-month. At the same time, Qualcomm itself predicts that due to the impact of low-end processors, the growth of mobile phone business in the fourth quarter will slow down. After the earnings report, Qualcomm's stock price fell by 4% at that time.
From the current point of view, although Qualcomm's hegemony in the field of mobile phone chips is still there, with the downturn in the consumption of smart terminals represented by mobile phones, Qualcomm's hidden worries have also begun to appear. So Qualcomm itself is actually looking for new growth curves, such as the cloud server market.
In 2021, Qualcomm acquired chip startup Nuvia for about $1.4 billion, trying to enter the cloud server market for the second time.
Although the chip shipments in the cloud server market are not as large as Qualcomm's mobile phone chips, the price of high-end cloud server processing chips exceeds 10,000 US dollars per chip, which is much higher than the pricing of Qualcomm mobile phone chips of tens of dollars. Therefore, after Qualcomm enters the server market, it will also expand its coverage in the hottest areas of the semiconductor industry.
It can be said that from mobile phones to automobiles to the cloud service market, Qualcomm is trying to transform from a top manufacturer of smartphone chips to a diversified semiconductor supplier. And this road, Qualcomm still has a long way to go.