For a long time in the past, most of the domestic mobile phones relied on the demographic dividend of the domestic market, and the competition in the domestic mobile phone market has been dominated by cost performance. However, with the deepening of consumers' cognitive concepts and the structural upgrading of consumer demand, high-end flagship machines supported by high-end chips and a number of black technologies have increasingly become the first choice for many users.
According to the latest news from Counterpoint Research, although the global smartphone market is still expected to decline in 2023, the high-end market (wholesale price ≥ $600) is expected to buck the trend and increase by 6% year-on-year. The high-end market not only means more profits, but also improves the brand image of mobile phone manufacturers, therefore, the high-end market has also become a highland for major mobile phone manufacturers to compete.
Among them, OPPO's confidence and foundation in hitting the high-end market stems from the achievements made in 2023. IDC data shows that in the third quarter of 2023, OPPO surpassed Samsung in the Southeast Asian mobile phone market with a market share of 18.3% and topped the list. This is a further performance in the overall regional market after beating Samsung in Cambodia, Indonesia and other markets in the second quarter. In the Chinese market, OPPO ranked third in the market share of high-end smartphones above $600 in the first half of 2023, behind Apple and Huawei.
As a new business card of China's scientific and technological innovation force, OPPO is one of the few brands that can wrestle with Samsung in overseas markets, while in China, OPPO is also competing head-to-head with Apple in the high-end market.
The leading position has not stopped OPPO from innovating. On January 8, 2024, OPPO released the Find X7 standard version and the 2024 super image flagship Find X7 Ultra, which is the first to carry a number of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, performance, communication, and privacy, such as: the first device-side application of 7 billion parameter large model, the debut of the tidal architecture and other cutting-edge technologies, with unique product innovation ideas and corporate culture, OPPO has also brought another choice to the high-end flagship mobile phone market.
OPPO is the first to launch Tidal Architecture technology
Leading the energy efficiency revolution in flagship mobile phones
In the past, although low-end machines have effectively expanded market demand, they have always been a red sea of price wars, and manufacturers have made very low profits. The price segment above $600 is the high-end "gold market" where industry manufacturers are concentrating, but this price segment is also the most difficult to penetrate, because it requires mobile phone brands to have enough ability to support the price of their products.
In fact, the competition in the high-end market has long been not only the performance configuration of products, but also the strength of innovation and research and development occupies an absolutely important position. Although there is still a gap between domestic manufacturers and Apple, there are still bright spots from the perspective of innovation. In fact, OPPO has stepped out of the era of fully following Apple, and dares to bet heavily in the face of new technologies, which is especially reflected in AI, performance, imaging, battery life, and cutting-edge technology fields such as folding screen hinges.
In terms of technological innovation in performance, OPPO announced its exclusive Tidal architecture technology for the first time to meet the more stringent needs of flagship end users for chip energy efficiency. As a chip software and hardware integration technology stack, Tidal Architecture has built a set of chip-level performance solutions from scene identification, to computing power demand, cache matching, and computing power scheduling, to solve the problems of storage-computing separation and chip scheduling faced by mobile platforms, and to maximize the energy efficiency performance of flagship chips.
Hong Hansheng, Director of Software Technology Planning and Architecture Design at OPPO, said: "Tidal Architecture is a collection of OPPO's self-developed chip software and hardware fusion technology, and it is a chip optimization technology created by a group of people who understand chips. In the past, from L1 cache to system cache has always been the technology area of chip design companies, through the tidal architecture OPPO has broken through the boundaries of technology, mastered the use of L3 cache to system cache, and brought a significant leap in computing efficiency to flagship products with chip-level capabilities in no man's land and deep water area. ”
Through the Tidal architecture, OPPO realizes the dynamic matching of system-level cache for the first time, and dynamically allocates system-level cache resources for CPU and GPU in real time according to computing tasks and rendering tasks. With this unique technology, Tidal Architecture can achieve an average energy efficiency gain of 8%.
In addition, the Tidal architecture also supports a new scenario-level computing power and power consumption analysis model within the chip, which can realize dynamic computing power and power consumption evaluation and analysis based on a single scenario, as well as real-time dynamic dismantling of each computing task into the computing power distribution of each computing unit on the chip, so as to find the best combination of energy efficiency and achieve more competitive energy efficiency performance for diverse user applications. By precisely and dynamically scheduling the GPU's computing power, the Tidal architecture can also control the display latency excellently, achieving an unprecedented continuous and smooth experience for the Find X7. In a test that simulated users launching the app 320 times a day, the standard deviation of the Find X7 with Tidal architecture was only 11ms, achieving a more stable and smooth performance than the same platform and other platforms.
Hong Hansheng also revealed that OPPO has begun to deeply participate in the design of the next generation of Dimensity chips to explore more possibilities of tidal architecture.
The 7 billion parameter model has really landed on the mobile phone
In addition to the demand for chip energy efficiency, what cannot be ignored at present is that the wave of AI is sweeping, and people's production and lifestyle are being reshaped at an unprecedented speed, especially with the development of large model technology in recent years, various industries are accelerating breakthroughs.
For the rapid development of large model technology, OPPO has previously launched a self-trained large model AndesGPT on ODC, and this time on the OPPO Find X7 series, it has realized the industry's first 7 billion parameter large model for end-side applications.
Compared with other application fields, the mobile terminal is one of the most difficult scenarios for large models to land. Due to the limitations of size, performance, and power consumption, if a large model is directly deployed on the device side, it is often difficult to achieve good results, and even if it can be run, the inference speed is not as expected.
To this end, the Andean large model integrates and optimizes the inference engine on the device side, and cooperates with Qualcomm and MediaTek to adopt 4-bit quantization technology in the industry (the industry's best large model device-side deployment solution), which makes the Andean large model respond faster on the device side, thereby improving the content generation time of the model.
Thanks to AndesGPT's 7 billion parameter large language model for complete device applications, the OPPO Find X7 series will bring next-generation AI experiences such as natural language understanding, text content summarization, and call voice summarization. Compared with other models on the same platform, OPPO AndesGPT's 7 billion parameter large language model can bring 20 times faster response in 200 word cap generation, and 2.5 times faster speed for 2000 word cap generation.
At the same time, OPPO's AndesGPT can achieve a maximum of 14,000 words in the abstract, which is 3.5 times that of other models on the same platform. In terms of generation quality, compared with the 1 billion parameter model, AndesGPT's 7 billion parameter large language model brings a more complete and accurate record of the call summary ability with a higher "IQ" comprehension ability.
At the press conference, Zhu Haizhou, software product manager of OPPO, demonstrated the powerful AI experience of Find X7. By demonstrating his daily life scenes, such as his son asking questions, his wife taking pictures, and talking to his mother on the phone, etc., it shows that the new Xiaobu (OPPO mobile phone's voice assistant) can naturally answer in different scenes; The AI model can also help users sort out the key points of the call content and accurately output the AI large model language summary function with topics, key points, and to-do list content summaries in the form of documents, completely changing the way AI is used on mobile phones.
Liu Zuohu, OPPO product officer, also revealed that OPPO has aggregated AI resources from various departments to establish an AI center. AI will become the core investment direction of OPPO in the future.
The force behind the technological innovation of the mobile phone industry
OPPO continues to invest in R&D
Not only that, but the OPPO Find X7 series has also raised new standards for flagship phones in terms of imaging and satellite communications.
In terms of imaging, in the past few years, some mobile phone manufacturers have fallen into the pursuit of extreme technical indicators for the application of computational photography, from seeing clearly to calculating clearly, constantly showing muscles, limiting brightness, limiting far, focusing on "100x telephoto" and "shooting the moon" and other scenes, recording beyond what the human eye can see. However, OPPO has different product design ideas from other manufacturers,For the path selection of image innovation,OPPO is the first pursuit of effect,Based on the effect and then determine what kind of algorithm to use,And what is the most suitable component to use,This is just the opposite of the path of optical hardware。
OPPO on the Find X7 is equipped with a super light and shadow image engine, so that MediaTek's chip image computing power is fully opened, the image engine is upgraded by the Fusion TMC algorithm, which directly drives the development of the industry in the field of computational light and shadow software and hardware integration, and is a new technical benchmark for light and shadow computing.
In the field of satellite communications, Huawei, as a pioneer, has brought progress from 0 to 1 for the industry, but OPPO has not simply followed and copied, but has gone one step further to solve the "last mile" problem of satellite communication and promote satellite communication technology into the 2.0 stage.
It is reported that OPPO has realized the innovative experience of handset/hands-free dual-mode satellite calling, leading the evolution of satellite walkie-talkies to satellite mobile phones. Users are free to use the handset mode or hands-free mode without being limited by how they can use it. Generally speaking, users use satellite communication in an emergency, after the phone is connected, the user will subconsciously put the mobile phone in the ear to talk, if the mobile phone does not support the handset mode and the signal of satellite communication is disconnected, it is likely to delay the emergency call.
The solution to the "last mile" problem of satellite communication is due to the satellite antenna pattern control technology released by OPPO, which can dynamically regulate the radiation pattern of the satellite antenna, so that the antenna beam is dynamically aligned with the satellite, ensuring that users can maintain connection and talk with the satellite in both handset and hands-free call attitudes.
It can be seen on the OPPO Find X7 series products that the application of innovative technologies such as tidal architecture, AIGC or in-ear satellite communication is the tip of the iceberg shown by OPPO's years of technology accumulation.
OPPO continues to invest in technological innovation, and more than 60% of the company's employees are currently R&D personnel. In addition, judging from third-party statistics, the number of OPPO's intellectual property patents has ranked among the top two domestic mobile phone manufacturers for many years, second only to Huawei. In the field of 5G, OPPO is the domestic mobile phone manufacturer with the largest number of patents other than Huawei.
At the press conference, Liu Zuohu said: "In the past, on the product side, OPPO has brought many firsts to the industry. For example, the first four-in-one pixel binning technology, the first Seiko pseudo-vertebral hinge, and the first main camera-level periscope telephoto and other technologies...... It is precisely because of these 'firsts' that OPPO has gradually become a major patent holder, growing into the second largest patent reserve manufacturer in China and the sixth largest patent reserve in the world. ”
The recent patent litigation between OPPO and Nokia was made by the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court in the first instance, and the relevant judgment documents determined for the first time that the global cumulative rate of 5G standards in the mobile phone industry is 4.341%-5.273%, and mobile phone manufacturers will greatly reduce cost pressure, which is a judgment that reverses the global communication patent pattern and is a milestone for the industry. After this case, OPPO is also considering gradually opening up its own patent licensing to promote the common progress of the industry.
Innovation for good
OPPO brings another innovative sample to the high-end flagship phone market
In the past two years, major mobile phone manufacturers have launched fierce competition in the high-end market, but judging from the results, Apple has maintained an absolute leading position, and Huawei has made a strong comeback with a Kirin 9000S processor, and it is clear that the market environment is becoming more and more severe.
In the case of the strong, OPPO believes that competition is the norm, OPPO has never been afraid of competition, OPPO is a brand that has been killed in the bloody rain. In the face of strong competitors, forgetting about competition and doing a good job of products is the simple belief that OPPO has always adhered to. Making good products is the only reason for the existence of the OPPO brand, and it is also the reason why OPPO has been in the first camp in the world for a long time. The end of competition in the mobile phone market has not yet arrived, but no matter how it competes, OPPO will always firmly believe that the market belongs to good products. Competition is not about who can tell stories better and who has a louder voice, but who can do a good job of the product, as long as the product is done well, users will naturally see it.
The market is the best test standard. Canalys data shows that in the second quarter of 2023, OPPO achieved the second place in the Southeast Asian market, and in Cambodia, Indonesia and other markets, it beat Samsung, ranking first;
In the domestic market, according to the data of the fourth quarter of 2023 from well-known domestic data institutions, in the ultra-high-end smartphone market of more than 8,000 yuan, OPPO is the only two domestic mobile phone brands with a market share other than Huawei, and the only two domestic mobile phone brands in the 10,000 yuan market.
In terms of corporate culture, OPPO emphasizes more innovation for good. With its unique product innovation ideas, OPPO has brought enterprises in various industries an action reference that can still stick to their duties and move forward with a smile in the context of slowing economic growth.
Chen Mingyong, founder and CEO of OPPO, believes that "technological innovation is likely to become a burden if it is not supported by a self-restraint mechanism and a higher concept." After thinking about the Chinese philosophy of "to conscience" and the philosophy of Western human nature, he put forward the concept of "science and technology for people, for the good of the world", to provide a verification criterion for the company's management and scientific and technological innovation, so as to correct various innovations that pursue short-term benefits. At the same time, it reminds us to pay attention to avoiding blind innovation because of fear of lagging behind opponents and not caring about people's needs in the process of scientific and technological innovation. ”
It can be seen that OPPO has put technological innovation in an important position, and has done a solid and powerful job, becoming an important force to promote the progress of the industry. The success of OPPO's global sales has made its high-end strategy also achieve phased results, officially forming a head-on confrontation with Apple and Huawei. Looking ahead, OPPO will continue to increase R&D investment, firmly promote "innovation for good", effectively improve users' lives through technology, and provide more users with an alternative to Huawei in the high-end flagship field.
Edited by Meng Jintao
National Business Daily