As the competition in the smartphone market enters a white-hot stage, the supply chain is also highly transparent, and it is difficult for manufacturers to establish a distinct product differentiation experience based on ready-made solutions sold on the open market.
In this regard, OPPO's series of measures this year can be said to be refreshing, the in-depth self-developed Mariana X image chip completed its debut on the Find X5 series flagship, and officially announced tens of millions of orders for this chip on the Reno8 series after only two months.
OPPO is developing its own 4nm mobile AP and plans to mass produce it in Q3
At present, OPPO is developing an application processor for smartphones, which is planned to tape out in the second quarter of 2023 (the first attempt to tape out the design) and mass production in the third quarter, the chip will use TSMC's 4nm process and attach a MediaTek 5G modem.
Objectively, OPPO is committed to chip self-research, and there are many considerations behind it, including those based on user experience, those based on practical considerations, and even supply chain factors. As the improvement of photography and system fluency gradually falls into a bottleneck, the marginal benefits brought by the improvement of hardware and algorithms are getting lower and lower, if you want to bring a qualitative leap, you must achieve three-way mutual integration and efficient collaborative processing based on chips, algorithms, and software.
Although mobile phone manufacturers can buy upstream chip solutions, and then achieve iterative evolution of products. But the disadvantages of this are also obvious, that is, you can only follow the upstream rhythm, and you cannot carry out in-depth optimization from hardware to software and algorithms.
At present, OPPO's self-developed Mariana X and Y chips, the former is a self-developed image NPU chip, and the latter is a flagship Bluetooth audio SoC. According to the successive launch of X and Y chips, it can be seen that OPPO's long-term goal is to develop its own SoC.
In addition, the OPPO chip R&D center project land was successfully delisted on December 27, the project land is located in Dongguan Jiaoxian Bay Peninsula, with a total investment of 4.5 billion yuan, covering an area of 387 acres, aiming to build a chip R&D center, chip experimental testing center, semiconductor equipment research center, 5G terminal R&D center, artificial intelligence R&D center, etc.
Mobile phone manufacturers self-developed AP: difficult to pass
The advantages of mobile phone self-developed AP are based on a more complex research and development process and a higher technical threshold. From NPU to AP, from special chips to general-purpose chips, chip architecture is more complex, processing power requirements are higher, and chip manufacturers' comprehensive capabilities and technology accumulation requirements are higher.
"Mobile phone manufacturers to develop their own mobile phone SoC, in addition to having sufficient technical strength in the chip field, but also require that the amount of their own products is large enough to support the ecology of self-developed chips, at present, there are only large manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, and Huawei in the world, with such technical strength and product ecology." Bu Rixin said.
And the development of AP is not the end of mobile phone processors. The next step is to consider whether to attach the baseband or develop a mobile phone SoC with integrated baseband. Integrated baseband has many advantages such as reducing power consumption, improving mobile phone battery life, and reducing the overall area of the processor, but the difficulty of SoC development with integrated baseband is far higher than that of AP, and even Apple, which has launched ten generations of self-developed APs, is also on the way.
The research and development of mobile APs can purchase Arm's CPU and GPU architecture and then customize the development, and the baseband is more difficult. To develop and integrate baseband, it is necessary to recruit talents who master cellular communication, and the development workload is relatively full, and the cycle is relatively long.
Even if a mobile SoC with AP and baseband integration is developed, it often requires continuous iterative updates and ecological accumulation of software and hardware to be shipped in large quantities on high-end machines. The development of mobile phone processors takes time to accumulate, and from the precedents in the industry, it often takes about three generations of product iteration cycles to move from "usable" to "easy to use".