A few years ago, high-end mobile phone chips were undoubtedly the most competitive place in the market. Because this will not only directly affect the performance of mobile phones, but also the face problems of mobile phone manufacturers. At the same time, for mobile phone manufacturers, let users remember It’s harder to live with yourself than to buy a mobile phone.
With the saturated development of the high-end mobile phone market, the mid-end market has become a new battleground for manufacturers. Among them, the mid-end market has also emerged a number of eye-catching chips, such as Huawei's Kirin 659, Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 chip, etc. The chip not only inherits the strong performance of the high-end chip, but also adopts advanced process technology, and its performance and power consumption all have good performance, so it has also become the 'God U' by users.
Qualcomm released a new mid-range series chip, the Snapdragon 700 series, at this year's MWC2018. The first product is the Snapdragon 710, which uses a new Kryo 360 core based on the Cortex-A75 deep customization, two Kryo 360 high-performance core, clocked at up to 2.2GHz. 6 Kryo 360 energy-efficient core, more energy-saving for daily use. CPU performance is 20% higher than Snapdragon 660, energy efficiency ratio increased by 25%, and has been in Xiaomi 8 SE not long ago Mass production on the mobile phone.
Shortly after the release of the Snapdragon 710 chip, Huawei's Kirin 710 chip is also available. Although from the running point data, the Kirin 710 chip can't keep up with the Snapdragon 710, even worse than the Snapdragon 710. But this does not mean Qualcomm will be able to sit back and relax. After learning the lessons of high-end chips, Qualcomm has become much more conservative, ready to release new chips to consolidate its market position.
Recently, the second product of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 700 series, the Snapdragon 720, has also been exposed. According to the exposure information, the Snapdragon 720 will be a comprehensive upgrade of the Snapdragon 710. See the NPU on the Kirin 970 chip. Brilliant, Qualcomm also introduced the NPU to this new product, mainly responsible for the AI module.
Because the Snapdragon 710 uses a 10nm LPP process, with two Kryo 360 Gold cores and six Kryo385 Silver eight-core designs, the enhanced Snapdragon 720 is likely to retain two large and six small CPU architectures. At the same time, the core frequency is increased.
It is reported that the Snapdragon 720 will change even more on the AI than the performance-based speed reduction. According to Qualcomm, the new Snapdragon 710 uses a multi-core AI engine, which is more common than the Snapdragon 660. AIE, the performance at the AI level has increased by nearly 200%, so after the addition of the NPU unit, the performance of the new machine equipped with the Snapdragon 720 is more worthy of expectation.
Just when everyone was happy, the third Snapdragon 700 series chip was exposed. It is reported that the chip is Snapdragon 730, and like the Snapdragon 720, it also has built-in NPU unit, it seems that Qualcomm regards AI as a development The main goal. The Snapdragon 730 is based on the Samsung 8nm LPP process (theoretical 10% energy saving compared to 10nm LPP). The CPU is designed for the size of the '2 Big+6 Little' core design. The large core is the Kryo 400 series, clocked at 2.3GHz. The GPU is Adreno 615, clocked at 750MHz.
As for the time to market, the media expects that the first launch of the Snapdragon 720 will be in the first half of 2019, and since Samsung's 8nm was only verified in October last year, according to the general process, the Snapdragon 730 may have to wait until late 2019.
It is worth mentioning that the news of the Snapdragon 680 chip was also reported on the Internet. From this series of actions, the mid-end market has become the focus of Qualcomm in the past two years. In addition, it can be seen that Whether it is a mid-market or a high-end market, users are paying more and more attention to practicality. The previous set of methods that sacrificed user experience and desperate heap performance is no longer feasible.
