With the release of new chips by various chip companies, Qualcomm’s new high-end chip Snapdragon 875, the leader of mobile phone chips, has also begun to appear in performance testing software. From a performance perspective, this chip will undoubtedly become the king of the Android market. Unfortunately, this chip does not integrate 5G baseband.
It is said that the Snapdragon 875 will adopt a 1+3+4 architecture, that is, one X1+three A78+four A55s. The X1 core is the latest high-performance core released by ARM. The performance has been greatly improved, supplemented by the 5nm process, so it can Provides powerful performance. According to AnTuTu's test, this chip has a running score of 850,000 points, crushing all current Android phone chips.
Qualcomm's new 5G baseband is called X60, and it is also produced using 5nm process. Compared with other Android mobile phone chips, the biggest feature of X60 is to support 5G millimeter wave technology. This is the 5G technology that the United States has always emphasized. China and Europe mainly promote 5G. With centimeter wave technology, Qualcomm's X60 baseband supports both 5G millimeter wave and 5G centimeter wave technologies in order to meet the needs of all parts of the world. Perhaps the technology is too complex and the power consumption is too high to integrate with the Snapdragon 875 chip as a SOC chip.
The chip does not integrate the baseband, which will cause the power consumption and cost of the mobile phone chip to be too high. The Snapdragon 865 chip released by Qualcomm last year did not integrate the 5G baseband X55, causing many 5G mobile phones using the Snapdragon 865 chip to be expensive. Among them, Xiaomi claims to use The cost of the Xiaomi Mi 10 with the Snapdragon 865 chip is as high as 1,500 yuan, accounting for nearly 40% of the price of the mobile phone.
Currently released 5G mobile phones generally have the problem of high power consumption. The iPhone 12 released by Apple recently was exposed to a sharp increase in power consumption after turning on 5G, resulting in a significant reduction in battery life. Other Android phones can only increase battery capacity to ensure battery life.
The result of this is that 5G uses high frequency bands, resulting in a small coverage of the 5G baseband and a large amount of data transmission. Qualcomm's 5G chip Snapdragon 875 uses an external baseband method, which will undoubtedly further affect the battery life of the phone. This is also the current Android phone. The general reason for the weight of more than 200g, the Android 5G mobile phone has also been mocked as a half catty machine.
Due to well-known reasons, TSMC is unable to produce chips for Huawei. The only 5G high-end chips that Chinese mobile phone companies can choose are MediaTek. I wonder if the high-end chips that MediaTek will release can compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 875. If MediaTek’s 5G high-end chips have its own advantages, it will further consolidate its leading position in the Chinese mobile phone chip market. Since this year, MediaTek has achieved a leading edge over Qualcomm in the Chinese mobile phone chip market.
Facing the opportunities provided by Qualcomm’s weakening in the Chinese market, South Korea’s Samsung also took the opportunity to step up its attack on the Chinese mobile phone chip market. Recently, there have been rumors that Xiaomi and OPPO are interested in cooperating with Samsung, and vivo, which has previously cooperated with Samsung, will further increase Strength of cooperation.
Qualcomm’s failure to integrate 5G baseband on 5G chips shows that its technical strength has been weakened, and it has been difficult to continue to maintain its position as the global mobile phone chip leader. MediaTek and Samsung strengthen their offensives on Qualcomm, which will further increase Qualcomm’s mobile phone Pressure on the chip market.
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