In 2013, mobile SoC developed rapidly. The ARM camp was upgraded to Cortex-A15. Qualcomm launched the new Krait 400 core Snapdragon 800, while Apple used its own Cyclone core A7 processor. In the high-end market, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA and Apple are engaged in a fierce fight. Looking forward to 2014, we seem to see more intense fighting

Qualcomm Snapdragon 805

In November, QUALCOMM released a new chip, Snapdragon 805, without warning, as its flagship product in the middle of next year. Let's first take a look at the hardware parameters of Snapdragon 805: the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chip uses the high frequency 2.5GHz Krait 450 core. The Krait 450 has no significant change in architecture compared with the Krait 400 on the Snapdragon 800. Qualcomm claims to improve power consumption and heating efficiency (it still uses the TSMC 28nm HPM process). Snapdragon 805 is equipped with Adreno 420 GPU, which has brought considerable performance. Qualcomm claims that its performance is 40% higher than that of the previous generation product (Adreno 330). It also supports Direct3D 11, OpenCL 1.2 Full Profile and other technologies. The biggest highlight is the memory bandwidth. The memory bandwidth of Snapdragon 805 has reached an unprecedented 25.6GB/s (the bandwidth of Snapdragon 800 is 12.8GB/s when the memory is 800MHz), which will provide better support for high-resolution screens. The Snapdragon 805 also officially supports 4K resolution screens, which Qualcomm calls "Ultra HD" processors. This horrible bandwidth data is due to the 128bit LPDDR3 used by the Snapdragon 805. With such a strong bit width, I believe it is not a problem to deal with the high-end 2560 * 1440 resolution in 2014.

From the perspective of Qualcomm's upgrade route, we will continue to enhance the GPU performance. At the same time, in order to respond to the 2014 high resolution standard, we will significantly increase the memory bandwidth. These improvements will bring better large-scale gaming experience to users. However, the CPU has made little progress. The frequency is up to 2.5GHz, which makes us more worried about overheating and frequency reduction.

Samsung Exynos 6&Exynos S

Apple has been in the "64 bit wind" since September 2013, and its A7 processor is the first 64 bit mobile processor. Samsung announced the next generation of flagship processors at the Analyst Day conference in November. The next generation of Exynos 6 will also be a 64 bit processor. According to the slides released by Samsung, Samsung will first launch the Exynos 6 series chip. This SoC will be based on ARM's latest Cortex-A50 series For the architecture configuration of LITTLE, Exynos 6 should be composed of four Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53, using a 20nm process and a working voltage of 0.9v. As for the follow-up product Exynos S, we don't know much about it. We can be sure that it is a 64 bit processor with a core independently developed by Samsung. Previously, only Apple and Qualcomm independently developed the core using the ARM instruction set.

Samsung used to be a giant in the ARM camp. With the popularity of its Galaxy series mobile phones, the Exynos chip has also developed strongly. 2014 will be a year of great changes for Samsung, because it will also launch its self-developed kernel like Qualcomm, which is undoubtedly very promising. Even with the first Exynos 6, the performance based on the Cortex-A57 kernel is still very desirable.

NVIDIA Tegra 5

The news about Tegra 5 has been spread as early as July 2013. Of course, it is still "PPT performance" as usual. Of course, the highlight of Tegra 5 is the GPU based on Kepler architecture (mobile version of course), The GPU specification of Tegra 5 is 192 CUDA cores. According to the official data provided by NVIDIA, its performance is more than 1.5 times that of the PS3, which can beat the current generation of Shenka 8800GTX (absolute graphics performance). As for the PowerVR SGX554MP4 of iPad 4, its graphics performance is only about 1/4 of that of Tegra 5. And the GPU of Tegra 5 supports OpenGL ES 3.0 OpenGL 4.4、DX11、 Surface subdivision, CUDA 5.0 and other technologies are quite desirable. On the CPU side, we don't know much about it. It is said that Tegra 5 will continue to use the Cortex-A15 architecture, which I think is unlikely. After all, competitors will definitely launch Cortex-A57 processors in the same period. I believe that our "Old Huang" will definitely let the new generation of nuclear bombs stack to the end.

From the GPU information of Tegra 5, it is not impossible for Tegra 5 to reach the top of mobile processors in terms of GPU performance. It is really too powerful to pull the Kepler architecture.

Apple A8

Due to the hot sales of iPhone and iPad, the chip of AX series new products almost every update is exciting. Of course, before the release of the new generation of products, we know very little about Apple's next-generation A8 chip, only a picture from the Industrial and Commercial Times:

From this table, Apple A8 still uses a dual core architecture, a 20nm process, and is manufactured by TSMC.

According to Xiao Bian, it is expected that Apple will continue to use dual core chips. What we expect is that the next generation of iPhone and iPad products will increase the RAM capacity and GPU performance again. Especially for the iPad series products, the iPad Air and iPad mini2 have used 2048 * 1536 resolution, which is still a little difficult for the current PowerVR G6430. I believe that in 2014 Apple will once again show us that "the A8 chip has twice the graphics processing performance of the previous generation products".

LG Odin

LG's presence here is really an "uninvited guest". In the past, our impression of LG was more likely to stay on the excellent screen and excellent cost performance, but next year we will focus on LG to add a SoC. Although LG recently announced that it would reduce the resources of its mobile phone department, the news of its own mobile processor Odin also kept coming out. LG's new SoC series is called Odin, and will launch two products, one is the quad core, which will use the A15 with the main frequency of 2.2GHz and the Mali-T604 with the main frequency of 700MHz (this GPU was previously used by Exynos 5250, that is, the SoC on Nexus 10). The eight cores are large and small cores. The four core A7 1.4GHz and four core A15 2GHz are used, and the Mali-T604 or Mali-T624 with 600MHz is equipped (it is estimated that the eight core version is better than the four core version). However, using the latest ARM GPUs Mali-T760 and Mali-T720 does not rule out this possibility for the time being. In addition, both processors use TSMC 28nm HPL process.

From LG's product positioning, it is obvious that Odin is launched for Samsung's high-end Exynos 5420, and the specifications of both are relatively close. The frequency of LG Odin's eight core version is even higher. Of course, if the next generation of Mali-T7XX series GPUs can be used, it will be even more exciting. But we also need to know clearly that even if LG Odin is successfully launched, its opponent may already be the Exynos 6 series

summary

From the "top five" high-end SoC we know above, the competition will be more intense next year than this year. CPU of Cortex-A57 architecture, GPU of Kepler architecture, 128 bit wide RAM, 64 bit processor will all become SoC keywords next year. With Samsung's self-developed core and LG's Odin joining, it is believed that the pattern of competition among major international manufacturers will also change. In addition to the above manufacturers, domestic chip manufacturers MediaTek and Quanzhi will also continue to make efforts to launch chips based on Cortex-A15, and even there is news that the latter will launch an anti sky architecture based on eight core Cortex-A15... Huawei's legendary K3V3 has really kept us waiting too long, and it is rumored that it will use the "4+4" structure of Cortex-A15 core and Cortex-A7 core, and match it with Mali-T658, Before that, Huawei's main force was the unlisted Hisense Kirin 910.