Recently, the industry expect China's Huawei Hass unicorn 950 mobile phone chip was finally released, as have a number of play baby games so-called innovative technologies in the industry has been widely praised, even the media with the "Guards" word as the title of the article to describe the unicorn 950 The performance has gone beyond the moment, and even the future of mainstream mobile chip manufacturers a product, such as Samsung Exynos7420, Qualcomm Xiaolong 810 (some say beyond the date of 820), the fact is true, as the surface looks so simple?
As we all know, the chip (including mobile chip) industry, although many factors influence their effectiveness, but simply play a decisive role is to structure and process innovation. This has been proven, the most typical manifestation of this is the game industry competition between Intel and AMD in the chip industry in the traditional PC. Also based on x86 architecture, Intel innovation in architecture due to far more than AMD, and supplemented by the process of leading (the industry's leading Tick-Tock mode), eventually defeated in the competition AMD PC chip, only the existence of a so-called cost-effective PC chip industry as a symbolic. This pattern is being repeated now competitive potential of mobile chip industry is presented.
PC chip industry with similar Intel and AMD, the chip in the mobile industry, almost all major chip vendors are based on the ARM architecture, namely either MTK, Samsung, Huawei, or Qualcomm, have adopted the official standard ARM micro-architecture "Cortex -A ", also known as ARM's reference design. Although the public version of the ARM ARM designs after the relevant tests, for a mobile terminal (such as smart phones) manufacturers can do to save time and costs, accelerate time to market, but also brought negative impact is obvious, that is, the chip homogenization, and ultimately reflected in the smartphone experience.
It is worth mentioning that, as the market, users and applications for smart phones performance and experience requirements for continuous improvement, ARM architecture also facing balance of performance and power consumption, which is why entering the 64 mobile chip era, ARM in public version of the design introduced in Reason "big.little" architecture. In the popular ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57, for example, using the same 20nm semiconductor technology to create, run at 1.5GHz, single core A53 TDP (thermal design power) of about 300mW, and work up to a single A57 core TDP 3W, power between a play baby games difference of nearly 10 times. From a practical point of view, such a large power Cortex-A57 is not suitable for carrying on the phone, but Cortex-A53 for high-end mobile phones in terms of performance is inadequate. ARM is given the means to solve the A53 and A57 mixed use, consisting of so-called "big.little" size core structure, the simple task of hibernation enabled only when the core A57 A53 core, A53, A57 together on complex tasks when, unfortunately, A53 and A57 instruction throughput and cache are independent of each other, if an application needs to run in between the A53 and the switch A57, A53 and A57 switching delay between the core up to the millisecond, it does not look a millisecond, reflect on your smartphone The most direct manifestation or is applied Caton, or is the power consumption is too high, the only way is to use a compromise to ease the process. This is why with the use of ARM reference design, using 14 nm FinFET process Samsung Exynos7420 overall performance (energy ratio) is better than the same use ARM reference design, but using 20-nanometer process mainly 810 Qualcomm, but Qualcomm 810 equipment The so-called "hot" Behind that criticism is the result of the public version of the ARM design and process behind the superposition of two factors, reflected in the market competition, it is Qualcomm lost Samsung Galaxy S6 flagship chip orders.
Compared with Samsung and Qualcomm, currently one of the best in the industry known as mobile phone chip design companies, the same ARM architecture Apple there have been no similar problems, on the contrary, its newly released iPhone6s and iPhone6s Plus using A9 Allegedly chip performance has reached the level of PC performance on-chip, which is mainly due to Apple's own chip architecture innovation. In fact as early when iPhone4, Apple has already begun using independent chip architecture, and further infrastructure from iPhone5 began to replace autonomous Swift, an architectural innovation of this result is that, despite Apple's iPhone clocked chips behind (in fact, It is to achieve power) in the same period other flagship Android camp nearly half, but the performance does not lose, and even beyond, until today's A9 significantly ahead of the competition. More importantly, with the chip architecture independent innovation capability, it means that Apple can with the greatest degree of freedom to optimize performance or power consumption performance of any one application.
If Apple is a typical representative of independent competition in the smart phone chip architecture benefit, then the tragedy of the high-pass 810 is negative representatives. The reason is simple, before 810, Qualcomm has been using its own chip architecture, and thus the formation of the rival differentiated competitive advantage of mobile phone chips and significantly ahead of the competition, but to the 64-bit era, Qualcomm because of lack of preparation, in order to compete in the blind to give up their own chip architecture design, and the first "easy way out" camel directly using ARM's reference design, the result is high power, delaying the market opportunity, at least for Qualcomm adversely affected.
It is because of Apple because independent architectural innovations in a successful role model of mobile phone chips Qualcomm 810 and give up independent architectural innovations and setbacks, the mainstream chip manufacturers will be key next-generation mobile phone chip core competencies as independent architectural innovations. For example, Samsung's Exynos M1 generation will be the first of its autonomous architecture "Mongoose" Qualcomm Xiaolong 820 using a proprietary architecture "kryo", and the relevant test data exposure from view, because the use of independent architectural innovations, performance play Frozen Games of the chip's has increased substantially in the same time, power consumption is significantly reduced, while improving other aspects of innovation in the smartphone space.
In contrast, the unicorn 950 chip release, in spite of the industry's pursuit of popular, but we did not see representatives of the chip industry and competitive trends of the independent chip architecture design brings results in the future (which is still copying the ARM "big.little" architecture), and of course we are here not to deny ARM "big.little" architecture and Huawei copied reasonableness of this approach, innovation and brings performance boost performance, after all, a lot of evaluation shows that Kirin 950 chip has made Huawei Hass squeeze into the global mobile phone chip first camp, par Samsung and Qualcomm, and bring it directly to enhance competitiveness in the smartphone market, but as the only Chinese mobile phone industry is expected to challenge Apple and Samsung companies, not only to focus on the present, but also to grasp the development trend of the industry, the only way. We can shorten the gap and challenging time, even in the future beyond, I am afraid this is the unicorn 950 chip Guards behind us, including Huawei Hass rational thinking.
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