Mobile processor: eight-core competition is difficult to avoid

If you are a smartphone enthusiast, you may have apparently felt more and more of the "nuclear" mobile phone processors in the market in the past two years. From the initial single-core, to the dual-core, to the quad-core that vendors are now focusing on. However, this is not the end. With the launch of Samsung and MediaTek’s eight-core processor mobile phone processors, “nuclear warfare” is likely to be upgraded again.

Will mobile phones really have more "cores" like computers? At least, companies on the current smartphone industry chain do not yet have a unified attitude. Some mobile phone chip makers believe that the eight-core processor is "meaningless foolishness," but some manufacturers insist that "existence is reasonable." Some mobile phone manufacturers are even more blunt. If consumers demand it, they will definitely launch smart phones equipped with eight-core processors.

Different attitudes

In early August, the chip company MediaTek (MTK) officially released an eight-core processor. Although this smart phone chip has not been truly marketed yet, the market has already revealed a strong atmosphere of the upcoming eight-core war.

Last Friday, at an industry development salon organized by the "Mobile China Alliance", several companies expressed their views on eight-core processors. Compared with the previous dual-core, quad-core mobile phone processor competition, upstream and downstream enterprises of smart phones have expressed their differences of opinion on the eight-core war that may be staged.

The world’s largest smartphone chip company, Qualcomm, has become a staunch faction against anti-nuclear warfare. Quntong China Product Marketing Director Bao Shanquan said on Friday's salon that according to Qualcomm’s calculations, the mobile phone processor’s contribution to the overall experience of the smart phone does not exceed 20%, and purely emphasizing the phone processor’s audit count is completely incorrect. Prior to this, Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher had shelled MediaTek's eight-core mobile phone processor, saying that the pursuit of nuclear quantity is stupid and meaningless.

Chip companies Broadcom and Marvell also do not recognize the "nuclear battle" in the continuous upgrading of mobile phone processors. However, compared with Qualcomm's clear opposition, they mainly value the attitudes of consumers and operators. "Broadcom has always believed that nuclear warfare is a correct direction, but it has to follow the market to do some last resort 'compromise'," said Qian Zhijun, director of sales at Broadcom China.

According to Ding Bin, vice president of Marvell China, the Chinese smartphone market is largely dominated by operators. If operators dominate the introduction of mobile phones with eight-core processors, they must follow, otherwise they will lose the market.

The largest cell phone chip maker in China, Spreadtrum, believes that the presence of an eight-core mobile phone processor is reasonable. Kang Yi, vice president of Spreadtrum’s communications market, believes that “if there is such a market demand, there must be eight-core products.” He said that consumers have various reasons for the demand for eight-core. “If consumers need it, you should do".

However, it is worth mentioning that at present, only MediaTek and Samsung have introduced eight-core mobile phone processors in the market, but the real commercial eight-core processor products are only Samsung's GALAXY S4 mobile phones. However, there are rumors that Huawei, Nvidia and other vendors are developing eight-core mobile phone processors.

Multicore "useless"

Behind the "nuclear war" attitude may be the hidden interest disputes between companies, but from a technical point of view, manufacturers are opposed to eight-core mobile phone processors have a very strong rationality. Tests provided by a number of professional organizations have shown that most smart phone applications do not actually require multi-core operations. In most cases, single-core processors are adequate.

In some of the popular smartphones equipped with multi-core mobile phone processors, Testin Cloud Measurement Technology once tested the top 100 applications and top 10 games in the Google Apps Store China region. Most of these applications are running. Mobile phone processors use only one or two cores. The statistics on more than 200,000 independent applications on the Google App Store found that the third and fourth cores were idle most of the time.

Wang Jun, president of Testin Cloud Measurement Technology, revealed that some popular mobile application developers are actually only concerned with the experience of single-core mobile phone processors. He said that the music social applications "sing", Youku, WeChat and other product managers and developers are testing on some single-core phones.

According to experts in the mobile phone industry, the mobile phone processor of a smart phone is actually only dealing with some calculations. More multimedia and camera applications are mainly related to the graphics processor GPU. The fluency and speed of operation of specific applications are determined. User experience.

In fact, after releasing Android 4.3 mobile operating system, Google is also guiding developers to pay more attention to the use of GPU. Google encourages Android application developers to use a mix of mobile phone processors and graphics processors. It is precisely this kind of guidance at the operating system level that allows some mobile phone manufacturers to firmly believe that "nuclear warfare" will be difficult to sustain.

Multicore "useful"

Since multi-core processors do not contribute much to the mobile phone experience, why are handset makers keen to promote mobile phone audits? In simple terms, because this is the simplest and most effective marketing method.

Qian Zhijun from Broadcom China believes that China's smart phone exchange market is fiercely competitive, while the market itself is not yet mature. In order to allow products and reputations to be widely disseminated, manufacturers have begun to “promise” multi-core speculation.

"Apple, HTC, Samsung and other manufacturers are very strong when adjusting the user experience and performance of the machine. However, many domestic (shanzhai) manufacturers' product promotion and marketing are from the mobile phone processor frequency, how many nuclear , and even indicators such as memory performance starting." Qian Zhijun said.

Pan Jiutang, an analyst in the mobile phone and electronics industry, believes that within a year or two, eight-core mobile phone processors are the marketing stuff. "This will be a very smart marketing strategy, but it's technically foolproof."

According to He Tao, general manager of BYD's mobile phone division, "the focus is not on quad-core or eight-core." He pointed out that if the price is the same, and provides eight-core processor products, terminal consumers will choose? "What the consumer wants is to give him good things and not to increase prices."

Undoubtedly, the "uselessness" of multi-core at the technical level and the "usefulness" at the marketing level will continue to be played for a long time, but at least in the market environment where one manufacturer's promotion can still effectively guide consumers, there is still a market for "nuclear warfare". Eight-core competition may be difficult to avoid.