Flagship phones are getting more expensive? The reason could be this

According to Wccftech, although the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and A16 Bionic are mass-produced on TSMC's N4 (4nm) process, it seems that the former is more expensive.

Twitter user Derrick posted that the price of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 reached $160. In contrast, even Apple's A16 Bionic chip costs "only" $110, which is $50 cheaper than Qualcomm's pricing — even though the A16 already costs more than twice as much as the A15 ($50). The increasing price of high-end processor chips may also be an important reason for the rise of flagship mobile phones over the years.

Of course, Apple sells finished mobile phones rather than chips, and can eventually recover blood and profit through the sale of mobile phones. Qualcomm and other chip manufacturers, selling chip solutions, have to consider the premium brought by advanced processes when pricing. But as a result, the price of chips has increased, and mobile phone manufacturers often have to raise the price of mobile phones.

From the price of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Qualcomm is likely to charge a higher price for Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, because Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 uses a more advanced N4P process on mass production, which can improve performance and efficiency.

Derrick believes that the price of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips is getting more and more expensive, which may be the reason why Samsung has never given up its own Exynos chips. According to earlier revelations, Samsung Exynos 2400 may return next year, using an improved version of Samsung's 4nm process for Galaxy S24 mobile phones in some markets.

Samsung foundry has worked hard, allowing us to buy cheap and easy-to-use TSMC process chips.

Recently, Xiaomi's overseas official website launched a special page, providing a countdown to the new product launch. According to the countdown, the Xiaomi Mi 13 Ultra will release an overseas version on June 8.

The official website also lists offers for new users who buy the Xiaomi Mi 13 Ultra, including a free 3-month YouTube Premium subscription and 6 months of 100GB Google One cloud drive service. In terms of price, the 12GB + 512GB version of the Xiaomi Mi 13 Ultra has been listed on some European e-commerce websites, with a list price of 1299 euros (currently about 9870 yuan).

At MWC 2023 in Barcelona in February this year, the series of medium-cup, large-cup Mi 13 and Xiaomi Mi 13 Pro models have also been launched for the international market, starting at 999 / 1299 euros respectively (currently about 7590 / 9870 yuan).

The Xiaomi Mi 13 Ultra is equipped with a Leica optical full-focal range quad camera, and a Leica one-inch variable aperture main camera; The screen is a 6.73-inch 2K LTPO screen, CSOT C7 luminescent material, 12bit color depth, peak brightness 2600nit; The processor platform is Snapdragon 8 Gen 2; the battery is a 5000mAh battery, supporting 90W wired second charge and 50W wireless second charging.

Impacting the international high-end market, can Xiaomi's wave really succeed?

Kamila Wojciechowska, a whistleblower familiar with Google Pixel, posted on Android Authority, exposing many details of Google's third-generation self-developed processor platform Tensor G3. The Pixel 8 series, released this fall, will debut with the Tensor G3.

What makes Tensor G3 special is that it uses a 9-core CPU,—— 4 A510 small cores, 4 A715 large cores, and 1 X3 super core. Although the 9-core CPU is slightly non-mainstream, compared with the previous dual X1 super cores and the outdated A76 mid-core design, the CPU of Tensor G3 is still much "Yang", at least fully embracing the Armv9.2 architecture.

In terms of GPU, although Tensor G3 is customized based on Samsung's Exynos platform, it seems that it does not use the latter's GPU combined with AMD, but uses the public version of Immortalis-G715, and the number of cores may be 10.

Since it is Google, AI capabilities must not be ignored. Tensor G3 includes a new version of TPU — codenamed "Rio" — clocked at 1.1GHz — that is expected to bring a blockbuster upgrade. Tensor G3 also upgraded the video block, supported AV1 decoding, supported AV1 encoding for the first time, and supported AV1 encoding up to 4K30.

In terms of baseband, Tensor G3 will continue to use the Exynos 5300 modem of the Pixel 7 series, which has better performance and better energy efficiency than the Exynos 5123 of the Pixel 6 series. Tensor G3 is expected to use Samsung's improved 4nm process technology, whether it can change the previous heating and power consumption problems, can only wait for the Pixel 8 to be on the market.

The design has caught up, so the most critical question now is how well Samsung's improved 4nm process will be.

AMD admitted in the recently released EPYC™ 7002 "Rome" Server Chip Guide that the kernel freezes after 1044 days of normal operation of the second-generation EPYC chip due to a bug in the clock countdown timer.

AMD said in the guide that the problem is caused by the inability of the core to leave the CC6 power saving mode (Core C6 State), which reduces the voltage and clock frequency, and the time of error may depend on spread spectrum modulation and REFCLK frequency reference.

On the specific time issue, some system administrators of overseas social platforms found through mathematical calculations that the actual time should be 1042 days and 12 hours.

AMD has provided two workarounds for this issue: one is to restart the server before the 1044-day period, and the other is to disable the CC6 sleep state.

The AMD EPYC 7002 processor was introduced in 2018 and has already exceeded the 1044-day limit, so some users may have already experienced this issue. However, according to AMD, there are no plans to provide a fix at this time.

This is equivalent to giving a hardware requirement that is out of service for maintenance at least once in 1044 days.

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