Yuanfang Group is involved in the design and production of smart phones, and took the lead in winning the Android system, and is now the world's largest supplier of smart phones.

But let's be honest, that's not enough.

In fact, people who know a little bit about smartphones know that the biggest puzzle piece of smartphones, chips, has been at a disadvantage in China before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth.

Even if he is now reborn and has changed history to some extent, the weakness in terms of chips still does not change.

The mobile phone processor should be called SoC, the full name in English is System on Chip, that is, system-on-chip, which is a systematic solution that integrates CPU, GPU, DSP and other modules, which is very different from the computer processor that refers to the CPU. Due to the limited size of the mobile phone and the construction inside, the space left for the processor is obviously not too large. In order to fit more transistors into a smaller chip, reducing the process is the most efficient way to do so.

The world's smartphone is the Tiantuo A6188 produced by Motorola in 2000, and it is also the world's first PDA mobile phone with a touch screen. It uses the self-developed Dragon Ball 16MHz CPU, although there is no advantage in processing speed, but the low-power route is particularly suitable for small PDAs, which is of milestone significance. The processor of this mobile phone is basically equivalent to the CPU, and other functions basically need to be implemented by an external chip.

The once expected TI OMAP3610 processor, 45nm process, ARM Cortex-A8 800mhz CPU, PowerVR SGX530 GPU, watching movies on the mobile phone, playing games without pressure, going out with a mobile phone can be done, and finally there is no need to bring a PSP. It's a pity that the follow-up TI withdrew from the mobile phone processor business after careful consideration, and since then there has been one less excellent processor......

The well-known Find 7 uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, Krait 400 core architecture, single-core frequency up to 2.3GHz, combined frequency up to 2.5GHz, Adreno 330 GPU, Hexagon DSP, and integrated 4G baseband. This was all thanks to the advanced 28nm process at the time, which allowed many modules to be integrated into the size of a fingernail to become a true mobile phone processor. At the same time, 28nm is also one of the longest-lived and most stable processes in modern times, and later Snapdragon 615/616/650/652/653, MediaTek Helio X10/P10, etc., are all based on this process.

20nm is a bit of a transition, at that time it also coincided with the transition of mobile phone CPU from 32-bit to 64-bit, I don't know if 20nm can't hold, or the processor manufacturer is not familiar with the latest technology, at that time, the Android mobile phones using this process are not ideal, and users often complain about the heating problem. As a result, some processors have relented to 28nm to renew their lives......

At that time, many processors using TSMC's 20nm overturned the car, and Samsung used its own 14nm Exynos 7420 to take the opportunity to reap a wave of praise. Subsequent processors from many manufacturers, including Qualcomm Snapdragon 820/625/626/660, Samsung's own Exynos 8890, etc., are based on this process.

The mobile phone processor process is getting smaller and smaller, and the difficulty of breaking through is getting bigger and bigger, and a leap like 45nm->28nm->14nm seems unrealistic in a short period of time. However, the advantages brought by the new process are undoubtedly huge, using 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 in the performance and power consumption is extremely balanced, even if the game for a long time does not generate much heat, the same period 670/710 also received a wave of praise. The second-generation 10nm Snapdragon 845 is in full swing, and its performance has skyrocketed, even compared with the non-flagship processor two years later, it is not inferior, and there is no "cheap and old" state.

The Snapdragon 835/845 with Samsung's 10nm performed well, and it seems logical to contract the next generation of flagships, but Qualcomm switched to TSMC on 7nm. Thanks to the new process, the Snapdragon 855 CPU is significantly increased by 45% compared to the previous generation, while the GPU is 20% faster, and the power consumption can be lower. The enhanced version of the 855 Plus increases the GPU frequency, and the gaming experience will be improved.

The subsequent Snapdragon 865 still uses the 7nm process, thanks to the new CPU, GPU, ISP architecture, the performance is better than the previous generation, but the power consumption is lower and more power-saving. However, 865 has also squeezed 7nm almost to the end, and the next generation is estimated to move towards 5nm......

In the era of feature phones, mobile phones also call and send messages, occasionally listen to music, and browse pictures by the way, the requirements are not high, and no one cares what chip is inside. In the era of big data, people's requirements for mobile phones are not only for the above simple functions. Mobile phones can be wallets, cameras, game consoles, scanners, AI assistants, etc., and can even replace some functions of computers, and the performance requirements for mobile phones are getting higher and higher. And good performance is inseparable from a powerful processor, and a powerful processor requires advanced processes to play a role, and mobile phones really need a good "core".

With some external factors and the consideration of their own development, some mobile phone manufacturers also considered making their own chips before the rebirth of the previous life.

For example, Ou Bao mentioned the [Mariana Project] in an internal document, and he wanted to devote all his efforts to developing his own chips. However, self-developed chips are inherently difficult and even life-threatening. Many chip manufacturers have also overturned, and some have even been out of the game. And the chip is made, but also to face strong patent barriers, although there have been manufacturers who can make chips, but also because of patent problems. Although Ou Bao's communication patents have always been in the forefront of China and even the world, whether it can support a [core] world, to be honest, this is still unknown.

This not only requires extremely strong R&D capabilities, deep technical accumulation, and most importantly, you have to have money!

Fruits have money, so they can develop their own chips.

The iPhone has been released from generation to generation, and the changes in appearance are undoubtedly huge, as well as the internal hardware. Before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, 11 years have passed since the first generation of fruits, and in addition to the iOS system, there are also their self-developed chip A-series processors.

Since the iPhone 4 debuted with the A4 processor, Fruit has officially embarked on the road of self-developed chips.

A4, as the debut of the fruit, the chip uses a 45nm process 800MHz ARM Cortex-A8 single-core processor, and the GPU is PowerVR SGX 535,L2The cache is640KB,The performance is better than that of Samsung S5PC110 at the same frequency,But the structure of its core is very similar to the Samsung processor used before,Only the main frequency increases,There is no change in the CPU architecture of the core,So strictly speaking, this chip is not the result of real independent research and development。

A5, released in Qiao's posthumous iPhone 4S, it is the first dual-core processor chip designed by fruit, of course, the changes in A5 are far more than just adding a core, its processor architecture has also been upgraded from the previous Cortex-A8 architecture to the more powerful Cortex-A9, which was born from the previous generation of Cortex-A8 platform new architecture, with higher computing power and lower power consumption. The GPU part is equipped with PowerVRSGX543+, and the graphics performance has been significantly improved. It claims to have twice the CPU performance of the original iPad, 9 times the GPU of the original generation, the A5X is an enhanced version of its performance, and the graphics processor uses a quad-core for the third-generation iPad, with twice the graphics processing power of the iPad 2

A6, designed by Intrinsity, a subsidiary of Fruit, and manufactured by Samsung, adopts a unique architecture design, with performance between Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A5, based on 32nm process, which can dynamically adjust CPU voltage/frequency characteristics, and the GPU integrates a three-core PowerVR SGX 543MP3 graphics processing unit, which is more than twice the performance of A5. Like the A5, the A6X was launched specifically for the iPad, with the CPU clock speed increased, the GPU replaced with SGX554MP4, and it has four cores.

When the A6 was born, the fruit began to move towards a high and unbearable situation, because the iPhone 5 equipped with A6 at that time trampled a lot of Android machines with quad-core processors in the running score list, and the fruit also proved to the world how the performance of a processor is, not just the number of cores.

The A7 is a new height for fruits, and it also opens the door to the 64-bit era for mobile phone processors, and there is no doubt that this chip has great epoch-making significance.

The A7 adopts a new 64-bit design, using the Arm-v8 64-bit instruction set, its own Cyclone architecture, using a 28nm process, and the performance of the processor clocked at 1.7 is 2 times faster than the A6 on the iPhone 5, 40 times that of the processor used on the original iPhone, and the graphics power is 56 times that of the original generation. In addition, starting with the A7, Fruit has equipped its processors with a low-power coprocessor M series, which is responsible for calculating various sensor data of the mobile phone and can maintain extremely low power consumption.

As the first mobile 64-bit processor in history, it caused a lot of controversy at the time, when other Android manufacturers desperately piled up the number of CPU cores, the fruit pointed out a new direction for the future development of CPU, which made A7 suffer a lot of criticism in the early days of launch, and many people thought it was a gimmick. However, it turns out that 64 bit is indeed a very forward-thinking thought of the fruit. At that time, someone had already started to cut videos on their mobile phones, P picture, 32-bit processor performance was about to touch the ceiling, and Fruit immediately decided to enter the game in advance, and relying on this, Fruit has always been leading Android manufacturers. So much so that while today's 8-core thousand-yuan machine is standard, the fruit still uses the 6-core design.

Since then, the A8, A9, and A10 have further improved the number of cores and process technology, and the processor and GPU performance have been rising, and it is worth noting that the A8X processor equipped for the iPad Air 2 at that time, it is the first triple-core processor in the mobile industry, and its performance is also extremely powerful. The A8X integrates about 3 billion transistors, half more than the A8, and three times that of the previous generation A7, and the main frequency has also been increased to 1.5GHz, its single-threaded performance is nearly 12% higher than that of the A8, and the multi-threaded performance has been improved by 55%, and the third core performance has been perfectly released, and for the first time, the fruit has added 2GB of memory on the iPad Air2. It has to be said that the performance gap between this generation of iPhone and iPad is very significant.

Of course, there is also A10X, when the A10 Fusion went to the quad core, the A10X went directly to the 6 cores unreasonably, using a 3+3 design, and a 12-core GPU, the fruit said at the time that it could easily edit 4K video, and it could also render fine 3D models, create, mark up complex documents, and then see which device A10X was the first to launch - iPad Pro, you can understand why it has such powerful performance, and it is not a gold medal to be crowned as the most powerful mobile CPU in history. Even now, the GPU performance of the A10X still dominates the list, and its CPU performance is not much weaker than that of the A11 and A12.

Time has come to 2017, and this year has entered the next era for fruits, whether it is the A-series processor or the iPhone. The iPhone 8 is the perfect end to the previous iPhone design language, while the iPhone X ushers in a new era of all-screen and face ID.

And that year's A11 Bionic was a performance monster.

A11 adopts TSMC's most advanced 10nm process at that time, has 4.3 billion transistors, adopts a six-core design, and the performance of large cores is increased by 25% compared with A10, 4 small cores are increased by 70% compared with A10, and multi-performance processing is increased by 75% In addition, the A11 is equipped with a neural network engine for the first time, with a dual-core design and up to 600 billion operations per second, which is mainly competent for machine learning tasks, capable of recognizing people, places and objects, and the most typical application is its first face ID and its derivative function animated expressions.

A11The deeper significance of the fruit is that it is the most independent generation of A-series processors at that time, including self-developed CPU, self-developed GPU, self-developed ISP, self-developed decoder, etc., of course, including neural network engine, since that year, almost all mobile phone manufacturers have taken AI computing power as the main page of the PPT, and the AI era has begun.

This is the cow beep of fruit, the perfect fusion of capital and technology.

And the other representative of this party is none other than the famous Qualcomm.

Qualcomm's first contract was a CDMA technology research project with the U.S. military. But that's not the only focus. In 1988, Qualcomm released a data communications system based on the OminiTRACS satellite to enable truck companies to track and monitor their fleets. But what really set Qualcomm in the direction was their CDMA presentation to 50 wireless industry leaders in 1989.

In 1993, Qualcomm was able to showcase its data services through CDMA, which also cleared the way for better mobile network connectivity. The Telecommunications Industry Association adopted CDMA, a cellular standard, and Qualcomm soon began supplying network infrastructure and chips to partners and licensing its own technology. In 1999, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) selected CDMA as the technology behind 3G.

In 1998, the world's first CDMA smartphone was born, which was the pdQ jointly developed by Qualcomm and Palm. This device is basically a combination of the Palm Pilot and a mobile phone, and it's not only big, but also expensive. But internet-enabled mobile phones are starting to rise. Qualcomm is very good at designing, making and selling integrated chips, and they also provide software services for mobile phones and wireless networks. Qualcomm's extensive research has allowed them to amass a large number of patents, and they have acquired more from other companies — most recently, Qualcomm has purchased a patent portfolio from Hewlett-Packard. Sales of innovative hardware and software, combined with the proceeds from patent licensing, have kept Qualcomm very healthy.

In 2000, Qualcomm integrated GPS into its multimedia CDMA chip and system software, which combined GPS with Internet, MP3 and Bluetooth functions. In the years that followed, Qualcomm's chips gained even more capabilities, including vastly increased processing performance and improved power management. This also ensured that they became the world's leading provider of mobile chips in 2007.

Qualcomm wasn't satisfied with that, and they launched the Snapdragon chip platform in late 2007. The chips also take the functionality, performance and energy efficiency of mobile phones to a new level.

Qualcomm also partnered with HTC to create the processing chip for the world's first Android smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, which came out in October 2008. While the Snapdragon series also takes care of BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone devices, their real success comes from the Android platform. Almost all major smartphone manufacturers use Snapdragon chips, including Samsung, Sony, LG, Motorola, and many more.

Qualcomm wants to do more than that. They also want to provide all the communication components in their smartphones. Their RF360 solution is intended to support as many LTE bands as possible in a small form factor while keeping power consumption low. This will create a real world of mobile phones in the future.

Qualcomm and fruit, these two are the next goals of Zhou Fangyuan's Yuanfang Technology.

In terms of batteries, Yuanfang Technology is not ready to enter the industry, after all, there is a BYD in China, and Yuanfang Group will not compete with it for jobs. But in addition to the battery, the system and the screen, now Yuanfang Technology is a monopoly, the next step is the chip, as the real heart of the smartphone, Zhou Fangyuan is far from looking at the fruit and Qualcomm to specialize in the front, although there are also chips in China, but the speed is slow, the results are not big, he is not sure if he can succeed, but he always has to give it a try, right?