From the herd to the tripod, the history of mobile SoC disputes

On the iPhone 15 Pro released last month, Apple used the latest generation of 3nm A17 Pro chips, and we will soon usher in two flagship processors on the Android side, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and MediaTek Dimensity 9300, another flagship SoC showdown is about to kick off.

In fact, in recent years, with the decline in the competitiveness of Samsung Exynos and HiSilicon Kirin , we have become accustomed to the situation of Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Dimensity, and Apple A series processors. But just as we can remember an era of blossoming feature phones, mobile phone processors have also had a world of competition. Today, we'll turn back the clock to the beginning of the century and see how the former SoC vendors disappeared from our sights.

Crowds of strife

Our story today can start with a question, that is, what processors are used by various brands of mobile phones in the era of feature phones? At the beginning of the birth of mobile phones, the functions of mobile phones were limited to simple communication and did not require powerful processor drivers. At the turn of the century, with the abundance of mobile phone functions, the requirements for processors naturally increased, and we began to see a variety of mobile phone SoCs in strange models.

Let's take Nokia, the overlord of the feature machine era, as an example, Nokia's models generally use the OMAP series SoC from Texas Instruments TI. Texas Instruments is an old semiconductor giant in the United States, and the world's first commercial silicon transistor was manufactured by Deyi. OMAP is an open multimedia application platform architecture launched by Deyi, using a low-power ARM architecture processor, which can be applied to mobile platforms. For example, Nokia's N70, N95, N900, and N9 are the OMAP 1710, OMAP 2420, OMAP 3430 and OMAP 3630 processors used respectively.

In addition to the Deyi OMAP series, another major SoC supplier for Nokia phones is Freescale. Freescale is also an American semiconductor manufacturer, its predecessor is Motorola's semiconductor division, which was spun off from Motorola in 2004. Freescale (Motorola) is also an important mobile phone processor supplier in the era of feature phones, and Nokia's generation arcade 5320, N81, E62, etc. are the Freescale MXC300-30.

It can be said that in the early years of the century, TI's OMAP series and Freescale had a strong dominance in the field of mobile phone SoCs at that time, of course, this is also related to the strong performance of their main partners Nokia and Motorola in the feature phone market.

However, because in the era of functional machines, even some early smartphones, their actual functions are very limited, the power of the processor is not as powerful as today, is the primary consideration for consumers when buying a machine, the market has not yet entered the winner-take-all stage, which also gives a large number of smaller mobile phone SoC suppliers space to survive.

For example, Samsung launched its first SoC S3C44B0 in 2000, based on the ARM7 architecture, manufactured on a 250nm process with a main frequency of 66MHz. In 2002, it was used on the world's first true smartphone, the Danger Hitop.

There was also STMicroelectronics, Europe's old semiconductor giant, which was also a member of the mobile phone processor market at the time. Its Nomadik is also based on the ARM architecture designed for mobile devices, such as the Nokia N96 is the STn8815 SoC.

Including Intel, which we have been ridiculing today as a toothpaste factory, it was also involved in the mobile phone processor market as early as the beginning of the century. When DEC went bankrupt in 1997, its StrongArm architecture was acquired by Intel, which launched its own family of Xscale processors. In terms of performance, Xscale is much stronger than the Arm processors of the same period. For example, the PXA3xx series in 2005 had a maximum frequency of 1.25GHz, almost four times that of the Texas Instruments processor (330MHz) at that time.

It's just that Xscale was born at an inopportune time, and its launch coincided with Intel's setback on the Pentium processor, and AMD almost matched Intel in the desktop market with the K8 architecture. Intel decided to abandon its insignificant mobile market and return to the PC space, selling its communications and applications processor businesses to Marvell in 2006.

There are also Qualcomm and MediaTek, which we are very familiar with now, who also launched their first mobile phone SoC at the beginning of the century, for example, the earliest mobile phone processor I can find is a MSM6225 released in 2005. But at the time, they were only one part of the fray, but some of the seeds of their future success had been planted, such as Qualcomm's communications patent, the acquisition of Adreno GPU from AMD, and MediaTek's highly integrated SoC integrated solution.

It can be seen that at the beginning of the century, the mobile phone processor market was relatively open, and although TI OMAP occupied a mainstream position in it, it did not actually open up too much gap with other brands. But as the first decade of this century draws to a close, the mobile SoC market has also ushered in its seismic changes. And this huge change we all know, that is, the era of smartphones has arrived.

Gradually withering

In the era of functional machines, but also in the era of 2G and 3G, mobile phones are not rich in functions, and the performance and integration requirements for mobile phone SoCs are not too high. And in the 2G, 3G era, Qualcomm's baseband chip also has many competitors, and at that time it was not forced to integrate the baseband on the SoC, and the baseband chip had less impact on the adoption of mobile phone SoCs. But with the release of the iPhone, the era of smart phones has really opened, and the most important thing for mobile phones is not its communication function, but its multimedia function, and the demand for mobile phone performance is unprecedentedly high. The advent of the 4G era and the convenience of baseband integration into SoCs have also greatly benefited Qualcomm and MediaTek.

Under the drastic changes in the situation, the original king TI showed no intention to fight. In the case of GPU performance and baseband integration are not as good as Qualcomm, CDMA patent fees are also paid, and a large number of peripheral devices on mobile phones, in addition to power management, other TI are not good at it. This makes continuing to develop SoCs to compete with Qualcomm a large investment, but small profit for TI. In contrast, TI's revenue from analog devices is much higher than that of mobile phone chips, so in 2012, TI directly announced that they would end their smartphone and tablet-oriented OMAP chip business and focus on embedded platforms.

At the same time as TI withdrew, STMicroelectronics we mentioned earlier had already cooperated with Ericsson to form ST Ericsson, although it launched NovaThor U8500 and A9500 dual-core processors in 2011, of which the U8500 has a good record, because it is the first mid-range dual-core, and it also integrates 3G baseband, which has been used by Samsung, Sony, Motorola, HTC, Lenovo, etc. However, its product performance can no longer compete with competitors in the same period, and ST Ericsson has been in a loss-making state, so just one year after the release of the U8500, ST Ericsson also withdrew from the mobile phone SoC market.

Marvell, which inherited Intel Xscale, almost never entered the mainstream in the Android era. It released a PXA1088 SoC in 2013, the specifications are weaker than the MediaTek MT6589, and the GPU uses Vivante, which even HiSilicon disliked at the time, and the result was undoubtedly beaten by the proud MediaTek at that time. Marvell saw that the prospects were bleak, so it never launched a mobile phone processor again.

At that time, Intel and Nvidia also launched their own mobile processors because of the booming opportunities of smartphones. With its own leadership in desktop graphics, Nvidia's Tegra series focuses on powerful gaming performance. Tegra 2, released in 2011, was adopted by LG, Motorola, ZTE, Tianyu, and most Android tablets at the time. However, the subsequent Tegra 3, 4 did not perform well, due to the early release, but lagged behind the same generation of competitors in the process technology, resulting in huge power consumption, the original Xiaomi Mi 3 Tegra4 can be called a furnace, causing consumers to complain. And products using Tegra still have virtual soldering, black screen, flower screen, touch failure and other failures, and eventually everyone has lost confidence in Nvidia, and Nvidia's attempts in the mobile phone market have also failed.

Intel, on the other hand, gave up the mobile market before the smartphone era began in 2006, and then saw its promise, so it made an ambitious comeback with x86. But Android is the home of ARM after all, and x86 is naturally unsatisfactory, so users find that there are too many incompatible problems. Intel pulled Google together to try to solve the compatibility problem between x86 and Android, but in the end the project did not succeed.

With the defeat of all the heroes at the beginning of the second decade, Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Dimensity, Apple A series, Samsung Exynos and HiSilicon Kirin have re-divided the mobile phone SoC market. About these stories, if you are interested, you are also welcome to leave a message in the comment area, and then we can talk about it separately.