On the morning of Monday, February 20, @小米公司 official Weibo posted a warm-up poster, announcing that the Xiaomi Pinecone mobile phone chip launch conference will be held at the National Convention Center in Beijing on February 28th. Xiaomi Pinecone Chip It is another self-developed chip by a domestic mobile phone manufacturer after Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin chip, and it is also an important step for Xiaomi to break the supply chain. So why does Xiaomi develop its own mobile phone chips?
Xiaomi develops its own mobile phone chips in order to get rid of the embarrassing situation of its own mobile phones being called "monkeys" or "futures". Whenever Xiaomi releases a flagship mobile phone, there is often a rush to buy it in the early stage, and the supply of mobile phones naturally exceeds the demand. The first generation of Xiaomi mobile phones continues to this day, and the problem that caused the initial supply shortage of Xiaomi mobile phones was largely related to the shortage of chips.
On January 15, 2016, Xiaomi Technology founder and CEO Lei Jun stated at Xiaomi’s internal annual meeting that Xiaomi will focus on its core business in 2016, form a special force, and break through the key technologies of core components; foundation, focusing on the future, and officially announced the establishment of Xiaomi Discovery Laboratory. This Xiaomi Pinecone mobile phone chip should be the latest achievement of Xiaomi Discovery Laboratory.
The ability to control chips is particularly important to the pace of the mobile phone market
Looking at the mobile phone market in 2016, we can find that mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei/OPPO/vivo, etc., have experienced significant sales growth. With good supply chain control capabilities, new products can be distributed on a large scale after they are launched. Huawei has overcome the chip supply cycle problem with its own Kirin series chips. Huawei's high-end models Mate series and P series have been released ahead of other manufacturers. Before the launch of flagship phones, for example, Huawei's P10 flagship phone this year is also the same. Huawei P10 will be released at MWC 2017, and distribution is expected to be in March, while large-scale shipments of mobile phones using Snapdragon 835 will have to wait until April or May. The LG G6 will also be released at MWC, but it will choose Snapdragon 821 instead of the latest Snapdragon 835 for the sake of market rhythm.
The reason why Huawei has become the world’s third largest mobile phone manufacturer has a lot to do with its support for the Kirin series. As one of the core zero-configuration devices, mobile phone chips test manufacturers’ ability to control the supply chain.
The main models of OPPO/vivo adopt another strategy: the main models of these two mobile phone manufacturers use mid-range chips such as MediaTek Helio P10 and Snapdragon 625. This avoids the problem of chip shortages, so mobile phones can be supplied to the market on a large scale in the early stages of their launch.
Xiaomi mobile phones have always used Qualcomm chips. The success of Xiaomi mobile phone 1 can be attributed to the Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core high-frequency chip. Since then, almost all Xiaomi flagship phones have used Qualcomm Snapdragon series high-end chips. The only The exception is that the Xiaomi Mi 3 has an NVIDIA Tegra version, but the NVIDIA chip requires an additional baseband, so its integration level is far less than that of Qualcomm.
It is difficult to buy Xiaomi mobile phones in the first one or two months after they are released, and when they can be shipped on a large scale, competing products with the same configuration from rival manufacturers will also be released, because for Qualcomm, it is not easy to buy them. Will be particularly partial to a certain mobile phone manufacturer, of course Samsung is an exception. On the one hand, Samsung is the number one mobile phone manufacturer in terms of shipments. On the other hand, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 series flagship chips in the past two years were manufactured by Samsung Semiconductor. Therefore, When Qualcomm's flagship chips were initially mass-produced, most of them were supplied to Samsung's Galaxy S series flagship phones.
Xiaomi’s Pinecone mobile phone chip is Xiaomi’s attempt to break the supply chain
Xiaomi’s self-developed Pinecone mobile phone chip, judging from the running scores posted online, the first chip is positioned at the mid- to low-end , using the 8-core A53 architecture, Geekbench 4 single-core score of 762, multi-core score of 3399. The performance is roughly at the same level as Qualcomm Snapdragon 625. Previous news said that Xiaomi 5C has a 5.5-inch 1080P screen, standard Pinecone processor, 3GB RAM + 64GB ROM. In addition, there are rumors on the Internet that Xiaomi is also developing high-end chips simultaneously, using ARM A73+A53 CPU architecture and Mali G71 GPU. The overall parameters are powerful, but the specific details of the baseband are not yet known, but the CDMA baseband should be quite difficult for Xiaomi. .
Self-developed mobile phone chips require huge mobile phone sales to support them. According to the rules of the semiconductor industry, the greater the shipment volume of a chip, the lower the R&D cost of each chip, and the lower the cost of a single chip. . Judging from the current size of Xiaomi, it can already support the research and development of its own chips; but in terms of cutting-edge flagship mobile phone chips, Xiaomi still has a long way to go. You can refer to the development history of Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin. Let’s look at the development of Xiaomi Pinecone chips. Compared with Huawei HiSilicon, Xiaomi Pinecone’s current major shortcoming is the mobile phone baseband.
In general, Xiaomi Songguo’s first self-developed chip is a stepping stone for Xiaomi to enter the semiconductor industry. It is also Xiaomi’s attempt to break the supply chain. Although the first chip is not a high-end model, it still represents Xiaomi’s entry. In the circle of self-developed chips, Xiaomi is looking forward to the launch of Xiaomi’s flagship phone using its own Pinecone mobile phone chip in the future.