According to the micro-network news, MediaTek announced the Q2 financial report for 2018. The Chief Executive of the MediaTek, Cai Lixing, pointed out that the consolidated revenue for the second quarter of this year was NT$60.481 billion (the same below), an increase of 21.8% from the previous quarter; the gross profit margin was 38.2. %, decreased by 0.2 percentage points from the previous quarter; operating profit was 4.092 billion yuan, an increase of 112.1% over the previous quarter; net profit for the period was 7.498 billion yuan, an increase of 181.9% over the previous quarter, an increase of 239.3% over the same period last year.
MediaTek said that the second quarter consolidated revenue was 60.481 billion yuan, an increase of 21.8% over the previous quarter, an increase of 4.1% over the same period of last year. The main reason for the increase in revenue compared with the previous quarter was the increase in new smartphone products. The main reason for the increase over the same period last year was Sales of smartphones and some consumer electronics products increased; operating gross profit was 23.113 billion yuan, up 21.1% from the previous quarter, up 13.7% from the same period of last year; gross profit margin was 38.2%, down 0.2 percentage points from the previous quarter, compared with the same period last year. 3.2 percentage points; the main reason for the change in gross profit margin compared with the previous period and the same period of last year was the impact of product mix change. The net profit after tax was 7.498 billion yuan, an increase of 181.9% from the previous quarter, an increase of 239.3% over the same period of last year; the net interest rate was 12.4%, higher than 5.4% in the previous quarter and 3.8% in the same period last year.
Cai Lixing said that at the beginning of this year, the market originally expected global mobile phone shipments to increase by 4%-5% this year, but it seems that it should not grow at present, and some of the company's customers are looking conservative. Therefore, this year's company is expected to add mobile phones this year. Tablet chip shipments are expected to decline compared to last year, but due to the increase in embedded value, smartphone revenue can still grow slightly compared with last year, but the overall revenue of MediaTek this year is expected to decline slightly from last year, lower than originally expected. He said that the P60 is only a good start for MediaTek. MediaTek is expected to launch a higher-end product than the P60 in the near future. It is believed that the S700 series will compete with rival Qualcomm, and the mid-range and entry-level fields will also be competitive. Will maintain market share, profit.
Therefore, due to the recent conservative demand in the smartphone market and the high base period of growth and maturity products, MediaTek expects consolidated revenue in the third quarter will range from 62.3 billion yuan to 67.1 billion yuan, up 3%-11% in the quarter. Single-season combined gross profit margin is about 38.2% up and down 1.5 percentage points; smartphone and tablet chip shipments are estimated to be 100 million to 110 million sets, which is the same as the second quarter shipments.
Cai Lixing said that the company will continue to improve its structural profitability. In addition, it also includes mobile platforms, smart deep, automotive and ASIC (customized chips), and continues to pursue diversified and balanced growth. He stressed that this year's smartphone segment MediaTek will maintain its market share strategy. It is expected that shipment momentum will continue to improve in the fourth quarter, and overall revenue will be better than the third quarter. As for the current China mainland mobile phone factory inventory, it has reached a healthy level.
In the face of 5G in 2020, Cai Lixing said that MediaTek is ready to play an important role in the 5G market. Next year, there will be 5G baseband chip M70 products, and there will be SoCs at the end of next year and early next year. The chip) will be more conducive to the development of MediaTek product portfolio.
The industry believes that Apple's baseband chips kicked off Qualcomm, which was taken by Intel alone. It shows that MediaTek's access to Apple's baseband chips has increased significantly in 2019, and 5G started trials between 2019 and 2020. MediaTek is in 5G and surrounding Internet of Things. The car network layout is complete, the next 5G generation rises, will be the MediaTek operation once again take off, return to glory moments.
2. Xilinx's next move
With the help of the programmable 'universal chip' FPGA, FPGA is starting to get hot in the data center, AI and other fields. The inventor of FPGA, Xilinx, has also made great achievements.
Xilinx recently announced its first quarter financial results for FY 2019, showing that the company's revenue reached 684 million US dollars, an increase of 7% over the previous quarter and a 14% increase over the same period last year. This sign that Xilinx has achieved nearly 10 consecutive projects. Quarterly revenue growth!
'At present, we have made good progress in the implementation of the data center strategy, and made a major breakthrough in the super-large computer.' Xilinx said that in the first quarter of the 2019 fiscal year, we accelerated the growth in the core market and set up a camp. Income and profit are high, and it is expected to continue to record growth in the second quarter.
In the meantime, in addition to the historical record high, for Xilinx, there is also an extremely important AI layout, which is the acquisition of China's AI company - Shen Jian Technology.
In the past 10 quarters, FPGAs have benefited from the high flexibility of programming, short development cycle, and high degree of parallel computing flexibility. Xilinx has benefited from the rapid rise of AI. However, it wants to continue Stable growth, for Xilinx, you need to accurately lay out the next game, that is to aim at car electronics.
In fact, Xilinx has opened up the market in the automotive field for a long time. At present, Xilinx has reached cooperation with 29 automobile brands, entering 110 models and distributing more than 40 million chips. From the camera, the front camera, Radar, looking around, from small processors to large processors, Xilinx has a series of chain layouts.
Tang Xiaolei, vice president of sales for Xilinx Greater China, said: 'Xilinx has achieved very good customer acceptance in many new automotive applications through the Zynq series. The product line includes a dual-core Zynq and a 16-based product. Nano-core Zynq, and MPSOC, are mainly used for full-screen video and driver status monitoring. In addition, they are also used in trailer images, cameras and radars, especially in the radar field. It is a 100% market share, and the binocular camera and the surround system can also find the shadow of Xilinx Zynq. Over the years, our market share in the entire automotive industry has continued to grow, and today the product has penetrated. Among the 110 models of 29 world-renowned brands. 'The latest ACAP released this year is also aimed at the automotive electronics market. ACAP has developed over four years and accumulated more than $1 billion in R&D investment. According to Xilinx: ACAP is A highly integrated multi-core heterogeneous computing platform that can be flexibly modified from the hardware layer based on the needs of various applications and workloads. ACAP can flexibly adapt to the dynamic adjustment during the work process, achieving the performance and performance power ratio that CPU and GPU can't match.
'Everest' is the first ACAP series to be developed using TSMC's 7nm process technology. Compared to today's latest 16nm Virtex VU9P FPGA, 'Everest' is expected to increase the performance of deep neural networks by 20x. 'Everest' 5G remote radio headend can quadruple the bandwidth compared to the latest 16nm radio. 'Everest' for the automotive market will bring significant performance and power savings, Xilinx said: Everest will be delivered at the end of this year and will be delivered to customers in 2019.
3. Qualcomm launched a $10 billion stock repurchase program, and 20 billion pending repurchase
Sina Technology News Beijing time on July 31 evening news, Qualcomm (64.09, 2.05, 3.30%) company announced today that it has launched a maximum of $ 10 billion stock repurchase program.
Qualcomm said it will repurchase up to $10 billion in company stock through the 'modified Dutch auction', with repurchase prices between $60 and $67.50 per share. Yesterday, Qualcomm shares closed at $62.04 per share.
The deadline for stock repurchase is 12 midnight on August 27, 2018, New York time. Qualcomm believes that the stock repurchase is an effective way to give back to shareholders. In addition, this is only a Qualcomm's larger share repurchase program. Part. Qualcomm expects to repurchase up to $30 billion in stocks by the 2019 fiscal year.
Qualcomm previously said that if the acquisition of NXP Semiconductors is not approved by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce before July 25, it will abandon the transaction. To boost the company's stock price, Qualcomm will choose to buy back 20 billion to 30 billion US dollars. Stock. Sina Technology
4. Qualcomm: confidently regaining Apple's baseband chip order
The micro-network news, this week is not very good for Qualcomm, not only the cooked ducks fly, but now even the meat of other people can not eat.
On July 25, at Qualcomm's latest earnings conference, its chief financial officer, George Davis, revealed a message: 'On the next generation of iPhone, Apple may only use our competitor's baseband chip products. ' This also means that the relationship between Qualcomm and Apple since 2011 is about to undergo major changes.
You know, although Qualcomm does not clearly point out who this 'competitor' is, the industry knows that suppliers that can meet Apple's requirements for baseband chips in the iPhone, except for Qualcomm, will leave Intel one.
Qualcomm has been providing baseband chips for Apple, but in recent years, Intel has provided more than half of its chips for Apple's iPhone due to patent licensing disputes between Apple and Qualcomm. Reuters reported last year that Apple is designing an iPhone without Qualcomm chips. And the iPad, this change may affect the products released in the fall of 2018.
However, according to Forbes, MacWorld, San Diego Tribune and other media reports, although Qualcomm lost Apple's baseband chip orders, but in January 2018 financial report, Qualcomm has said that it will not rule out Apple's future new smartphone will not Adopt Qualcomm's baseband chip.
Therefore, when this news broke out, it was not shocking to the industry or investors, nor did it have much impact on Qualcomm's share price.
Add this news at the beginning of 2017, Apple has foreshadowed, so we can easily find that Qualcomm has been trying to strengthen its performance through its Snapdragon series products in the past few quarters.
For example, by raising the price of 600, 700, 800 series chips, the market demand for Qualcomm RF front-end chips will be increased to alleviate the performance impact of Apple's failure to adopt Qualcomm baseband chips.
In view of the fact that Qualcomm still supplies Apple's baseband chips including Apple iPhones such as iPhone SE, iPhone 7, iPhone 8, etc., it also means that the cooperation between the two parties has not been interrupted.
Although Qualcomm has no hope of ordering new mobile phone baseband chips in 2018, Qualcomm still has opportunities for orders after 2019. Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon said he believes Qualcomm will still become an Apple supplier.
However, Apple is not a fuel-efficient lamp. In addition to Qualcomm's expectation of regaining orders at any time, the industry has rumored that Apple has already begun testing the integration of baseband chips from Samsung into the iPhone. This is certainly one of the calculations outside of Intel. After all, dual suppliers Strategy has always been the principle of Apple's risk diversification.
Not putting eggs in a basket is one of Apple's basic strategies for choosing an upstream supplier. Another obvious explanation is to consolidate the iPhone's high profit margins.
The most typical is the mobile phone screen. For example, last year, Samsung's OLED screen was the exclusive supplier of iPhone X, but if only one person can provide one thing, even Apple can't negotiate too much on the purchase price. The iPhone X's bill of materials can also be seen, this screen is the most costly, even more than twice the processor, and ultimately the profit margin of this device is not even as good as the previous iPhone 7.
Switching to a baseband chip, the same is true. For Intel, getting the baseband chip order for the iPhone this year will definitely increase the company's revenue figures, and the huge demand will further stimulate the improvement of Intel's manufacturing process. (Proofreading / Spring and summer)
5. Opinion: Is RISC-V likely to beat Intel x86 or Arm architecture?
In terms of the current CPU market, the Intel-based x86 architecture is roughly divided, and Arm's Arm architecture is designed to be large. Although there are architectural designs such as MIPS or IBM-led PowerPC in the past, the scale is not like x86, Arm architecture. Occupy most of the processor market. Since the RISC-V architecture design from the University of California at Berkeley in 2010, it has attracted the inclusion of IBM, NXP, Weatern Digital, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung in the form of open source architecture. Google, Huawei, Tesla join the manufacturers, perhaps in the future will have the opportunity to flourish in the form of 'Linux Linux'.
Compared with Intel's x86 architecture closure, only AMD, VIA (VIA) is currently used by vendors, and Arm's Arm architecture must pay a high license fee to use, or Arm agrees whether to continue to authorize. RISC-V The architecture has received a lot of attention since its introduction in 2010 due to its thorough open source design and the use of the BSD License open source agreement, which allows users to access it at will, and can be modified at will, even for commercial sales.
Due to the design of the architecture, the RISC-V architecture instruction set initially had less than 50 sets of instructions. At the same time, the research team completed the first version of the instruction set in only 3 months, and the subsequent RISC was adopted because of the open source usage model. -V architecture has added more instruction sets, and even added more exclusive instructions according to specific usage requirements. Currently including IBM, NXP, Western Digital, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Huawei, Rambus, Microsemi, Marvell, MediaTek , SK hynix, Seagate, CEVA, Alibaba, Allwinner, Orion, and University of California at Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, ETH Zurich, Indian Institute of Technology, Lorenz National Laboratory, Singapore Nanyang Academic institutions such as the Polytechnic University and the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have joined the RISC-V architecture. Even Tesla has announced its participation in the near future. It is expected to build its vehicle using the RISC-V architecture. As of November 2017 The RISC-V architecture has attracted more than 138 companies, 35 academic institutions to join, and even more adopted by Indian government agencies to develop state funding.
Designed in a streamlined form of RISC-V architecture, 64-bit meta-calculation mode can be implemented at this stage. Compared with processors designed with Arm Cortex-A5 architecture, processors built with RISC-V architecture can be used in computing performance. Increased by 10%, and the footprint is reduced by 49%, the clock operation power consumption is only 43% of the Cortex-A5, so it can bring a lot of competitive advantages for embedded devices.
As a result, Western Digital said it will build a storage device controller with RISC-V architecture, and NVIDIA plans to use the RISC-V architecture for GPU internal control components, and even the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to fund RISC-V. The architecture is aeronautical device control chip. In addition, many new startups have begun to use chips through RISC-V architecture design networking devices. Software has also been added to common development tools such as JVM, LLVM, Python, etc. Open source architecture, and free licensing, the RISC-V architecture currently surpasses Intel's x86 architecture, and the Arm architecture, which may still be quite difficult.
The main factors besides the Intel-driven x86 architecture market is quite large. Almost from traditional PCs to data center-sized servers, x86 architecture processors are used, and related software-driven application services have a 40-year history, and the Arm architecture produces The huge market application scale is more difficult to be replaced by the RISC-V architecture, so the current market may still be occupied by the x86, Arm architecture for a period of time.
The RISC-V architecture seems to have considerable room for development, but there are actually many problems, such as emphasizing a completely open source design, and allowing the user to arbitrarily add a proprietary instruction set, or even choose to close the architecture or maintain open source. As a result, the RISC-V architecture is currently the same problem as the previous MIPS architecture, because it allows more instruction sets to be added, so that although they are all designed in the RISC-V architecture, they may not share the same instruction set.
In the case of continued differentiation, it means that the RISC-V architecture will be the same as the current Linux situation. Although it is also designed in Linux architecture, it is differentiated into different usage environments, and even has some compatibility problems. Therefore, the current RISC-V architecture attracts a lot of lines. Manufacturers adopt, but at this stage to become the mainstream of the market, it seems that more time is needed for development. Economic Daily
6. Singapore Nanyang Polytechnic develops laser radar silicon wafers, reducing the cost of chips to $36.7
According to foreign media reports, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has made a technological breakthrough in the field of laser radar research, or reduced the cost of the autopilot core component to 1/200. In addition, the size of the technology product is only The size of the fingertip. Due to the mechanical moving parts of the lidar, the laser radar is more vulnerable to damage than the tire.
Text / Li Wenlong
Today, NTU researchers have discovered that silicon chips can be used to replace diodes (diodes). They also use the ductility of germanium, which is commonly used as a transistor. For the first time, researchers have discovered silicon-compatible luminescent materials.
Cheaper, higher performance
Black technology, forward-looking technology, NTU lidar microchip, NTU lidar silicon wafer, NTU lidar luminescent material, NTU lidar cost reduction
At present, even the cheapest conventional lidar sensor is priced at 10,000 Singapore dollars (about 7345.9 US dollars), while the cost of solid-state laser radar microchips is only 50 Singapore dollars (about 36.7 US dollars) (to achieve commercial In the case of research. When the researchers use the new technology to realize the mass production of the laser radar chip, the market price is 50 Singapore dollars, which will provide new business opportunities for many small companies planning to develop autonomous driving technology.
As of now, even conventional laser radars are too expensive, and many companies are forced to skip the device when they choose equipment.
Another benefit of this laser radar microchip is its excellent image quality and high resolution, which is mainly due to the laser density of the chip, and its image response speed is also faster.
This technology breaks or lowers the cost of other technologies, shortens its research and development cycle, and improves its reliability. For example, the laser radar microchip can be installed on a drone, and may be used as a mobile phone chip in the future.
Dr. Tan Chuan Seng, vice chairman of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, responsible for the R&D project, said: 'The chip has many potential applications to replace wireless network technology with visible light communication (LiFi).'
The project is being commercialized by the National Research Foundation in Singapore, and it is possible to commercialize the lidar chip in the next five years. cnBeta