For the small number of mobile chip designers, 2012 and 2013 were sad years. With the exception of Qualcomm, SS and MTK, the rest of the players have already left in tears or are about to leave.

The first to admit is that in 2011, there was still some vigorous TI, due to the lack of its own baseband, in 2012 it was defeated by Qualcomm, which caught up, and simply closed the entire production line.

And Broadcom, which is a ticket nature, after testing the waters and launching one, extinguished his mind without being shocked, even the arrogant NVIDIA, after breaking in, found that the situation was not as gold everywhere as originally imagined.

Only Sun Mobile Computing, with the strong financial support of Liu Ruoyi, relies on the Aries MM-710 to continue to promote its own business, in terms of baseband, they have bought Altair Semiconductor, a small powerhouse in the Middle East, and now have their own LTE baseband processor design capabilities.

Although 3G is still in its infancy, the 4G LTE trend has been unstoppable since 2012. 2.5G and 3G market, Liu Ruoyi has all handed over to the acquired MTK to impact, after several rounds of high-end chip efforts have failed, Liu Ruoyi knows that MTK has no hope of PK with Qualcomm competitors in high-end mobile chips.

Therefore, this market is divided into two, MTK focuses on the low-end market, develops more cost-effective and new low-end mobile processing chips, and faces a large number of low-end mobile phone markets with unlimited development potential in the future.

Although the gross profit margin will be lower, the number base is large, and there is a bright future.

And the high-end market, now it is left to Sun Mobile Computing.

The acquisition of MOTO Mobile has made up for the weakness of the terminal application in the lack of its own strong mobile phone terminal brand, while the acquisition of Altair Semiconductor has made up for its shortcomings in baseband.

The new Aries, which has been pre-ordered and called the Aries 800, has eliminated the complicated and inconsistencious alphabet numbering. The processor cores use the MIPS P1000 core 2GHz quad-core scheme, while the GPU side, the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 has been confirmed. Coupled with Altair's LTE baseband, this Aries 800 will have the flagship performance of the 4G era.

In terms of process technology, the latest 25nm process technology will be used by Dragon Factory to ensure excellent performance in terms of chip area, power consumption and heat dissipation, although the cost is much more expensive than that of using 28nm process technology.

But this mobile processor is a real milestone work of solar mobile computing, after the baptism of two generations of Aries chip design, billions of dollars have been invested in solar mobile computing, if this chip can not achieve results, basically this path will face the risk of premature death.

The Aries 800 is under intense pressure from Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 released on CES2013 at the beginning of the year. The Snapdragon 800 uses the new Krait 400 asynchronous quad-core architecture, which can reach a maximum frequency of 2.3GHz, and integrates the Adreno 330 GPU, which looks very powerful indeed.

Therefore, the Aries 800 is now also using the 4-core architecture model, and the MIPS32 team has successfully developed a new core MIPS32 P1000 to create a new era of performance, and has achieved the achievement of 3.4DMIPS/Mhz, although it is currently 2GHz in terms of design frequency, but with the excellent DMIPS performance of the single core, it is not inferior to the 2.3GHz of the Snapdragon 800.

In addition, the performance of PowerVR's SGX 554MP4 is not much different from that of the Adreno 330 GPU, and in terms of performance indicators, the Aries 800 has a fight with the Snapdragon 800.

Of course, the biggest problem now is that the Snapdragon 800 has already arrived, and the Aries 800 will not be taped out until at least the second quarter of 2013.

That said, the Snapdragon 800 is at least 2 quarters ahead in time.

For this time gap, everyone can understand, after all, the start has been a lot, that is, the team in the design of mobile computing chips in the sun is very strong, and after TI withdrew from the mobile processor, several master designers of OMAP processor design were tapped to the Aries team, which greatly enhanced and made up for the lack of experience in mobile processor design.

With this foundation, Sun Mobile Computing will progress to about a year and a half to design a generation of major mobile processors.

Of course, this also has something to do with the fact that several kernels are completed by different teams.

MIPS32 P1000, SGX 554MP4 and baseband cores are all ready-made, and the thing to do in the middle is how to integrate well, so that the relationship between power consumption and performance can be taken into account under the 4 cores, and the other is to perform the frequency conversion function of the chip.

These are also quite cutting-edge technologies, and now the team has begun to experiment with software conversion from 800MHz to 2GHz, and can achieve automatic multi-core switching, if realized, at the lowest power consumption, equivalent to a single-core low-frequency P1000 running.

For applications that are extremely valuable to the phone's battery, a simple on-screen text display for this type of application, the Aries 800 will run in a way that is quite power-efficient.

For example, calling, texting, and WhatsApp's current text chat are common tasks, which are expected to be run in low-power mode in the future, which can greatly improve the battery life of the phone.

Of course, these are still in the process of simulation, and the specific effect needs to be realized after tape-out.

With Qualcomm in the CES2013 pushed out of a flagship chip, this is the 1.8Ghz quad-core Tegra4, known as the world's strongest performance at the moment.

However, the sad thing is that after its launch, no big-name mobile phone has chosen to use it to develop a flagship phone for several months.

Of course, it is not completely useless for mobile phone manufacturers, at least among the many mobile phone manufacturers in the mainland, a cutting-edge mobile phone manufacturer called "coarse grain" has chosen the world's strongest processor to develop the strongest cost-effective flagship machine in the universe.

According to Liu Ruoyi's memory of the last time and space, the future of the world's strongest is very worrying, because since this chip, I have not heard of NVIDIA creating a miracle of mobile processors.

But it was completely submerged in the dust of history, in fact, if it weren't for this time and space doing this thing, Liu Ruoyi knew more about the current mobile processor, Liu Ruoyi didn't know that there were so many mobile processors in the world in the last time and space.

However, it seems that most of this plane will still become tragedies.

can really become a general-purpose mobile processor, Liu Ruoyi's impression is only Qualcomm and MTK, and other mobile processor products such as Apple or SS company designed and digested by themselves, Liu Ruoyi will not have much understanding.

Now with the rise of 4G network, the demand for flagship mobile phones will increase greatly, enhance a lot of wireless network bandwidth, and will begin to popularize the real mobile Internet era with the reduction of traffic costs.

In the 3G era, everyone can only be aggrieved to just transmit a little picture or a small amount of voice, but in the 4G era, mobile video will be popular.

Therefore, the new WhatsApp and mainland versions of the high-dimensional mobile Internet have been updated with the latest version of the voice and video chat functions, and users can enable face-to-face video chat through the mobile phone's WiFi or wireless traffic above 3G!

Among the supporters, Aurora Media Group is the largest shareholder and copyright provider of the two independent video websites, Enterprise Video and Wangju Video.

Therefore, the popularity of these video applications has begun to make the performance hunger of mobile phones more and more prominent.

Originally, this trend is an excellent opportunity for mobile processor manufacturers, and the demand for high-performance processors will be increasing, but because the technical content behind this processor is too high, the R&D cost is also extremely huge, and the 28nm process process is millions of dollars at a time, and the R&D team starts with hundreds of senior R&D engineers.

The annual salary of high-end talents is millions of dollars, and the annual salary of experienced designers is more than 200,000 US dollars, and the R&D investment can only be supported by hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

If it weren't for the support of a big tyrant like Liu Ruoyi, a company of this size would not be able to support such a team with the movement of the sun.

At present, Sun Mobile Computing has a huge annual R&D expenditure of nearly 10 billion US dollars in MIPS general and mobile processors, and Sun Mobile Computing's own hematopoiesis is not enough to support it, and the remaining funding gap is purely dependent on Liu Ruoyi's funds to transfuse blood through West Coast Capital.

Of course, the licensing fee of the MIPS64 high-performance low-power processor for server use has begun to pay off, barely able to support the research and development of this piece, and after a few more powerful models come out, the licensing fee is estimated to support the development of the MIPS64 processor itself.

Now on the MIPS64 processor, there is an ultra-low power dual-core processor in research and development, according to the specifications of this M64-0220 processor core, the target power consumption is 2W, dual-core and 2.0GHz frequency, but the performance is twice that of P1000!

Obviously, this is a high-performance processor core for the next generation of mobile processors developed for Aries, and with this core, at least in terms of performance indicators, Aries can greatly improve it.

However, compared to the previous generation, this change of the new model processor is quite large, and the integration of software and hardware is also risky. Therefore, it is still uncertain whether this solution will be used to develop the next generation of flagship processors.

Continuing to evolve along the MIPS32 architecture is obviously a less risky and more guaranteed solution, but the performance improvement is not so significant, and the future performance ceiling is also very obvious, and in the long run, it will have to transition to the MIPS 64-bit architecture sooner or later.

This is not just the case with the MIPS architecture, but the ARM camp is now also starting to move to 64-bit architectures.

Therefore, it can only be said that both options have their own advantages and disadvantages, one looks at the long-term and the other looks at the short-term.

Of course, in any case, the evolution of processor cores with major computing power to 64-bit processors in the future is certain, but whether it is the ARM camp or the MIPS camp, this needs to be done to meet the growing performance demand.

The pursuit of newer games, more powerful light and shadow effects, and more realistic game scenes must be realized in a small mobile phone, which is a nightmare for chip designers!

Perhaps because of this, in the field of mobile processors, even Intel's chip processor Taishan Beidou is a little inadequate, relying on independent architecture in the evolution of mobile processor projects to 2013, the prospects of the mobile market are getting bleaker and darker.

Time passed day by day.

The three R&D center teams of the Aries 800 project are all advancing at a high speed, from the U.S. R&D center on the east coast of the ocean to the Xiangjiang Asia-Pacific R&D center and the Beijing R&D center in Xi'an, each responsible for its own part of the R&D.

Of course, the main chip is mainly based on the American R&D center, and the core talents are all in the United States, and it is impossible to transfer them in a short time.

The Heung Kong Asia Pacific R&D Center is responsible for process docking and verification simulation of the same foundry, as well as handling some peripheral hardware PCB reference designs.

The Beijing R&D center is fully responsible for the research and development of the software part, including important system software research and development support such as drivers and Android system adaptation.

Nearly 3,000 R&D personnel from different regions and countries are working around this project, and this kind of competitive R&D atmosphere is completely inextricable by the original Sun Mobile Computing itself in R&D.

When you get off work at the end of the day, who is embarrassed to push off the questions sent by your colleagues in different time zones?

Even if there is a strong trade union protection mechanism, as a real R&D personnel, everyone still has to face it.

Therefore, in the collaborative work of the WhatsApp communication group, an atmosphere of racing against time does not need to be supervised, and it is naturally formed.

In particular, the Beijing R&D center is basically rotating according to the rhythm of 996, and the software system is forcing the hardware department to catch up with the progress formulated by itself.

In the last week of the second quarter of 2013, the R&D of the Aries 800 was successful, and the design and manufacturing process documents began to be submitted to the 25nm process production line of the Dragon Factory.

After waiting nervously for a week, the tape-out was a one-time success on the production line of the Dragon Factory, and the chip could start to feedback the test information!

After a period of jubilation, the intense testing work of the Asia-Pacific R&D Center began.

After patching to the motherboard, the Android system is successfully booted!

The first call was successful!

Dozens of game compatibility tests successful!

The next step is to conduct network docking tests with PCCW, from 3G to a small number of 4G LTE base stations laid by PCCW.

Although it was not all smooth sailing in the network test, most of the problems were corrected on the spot as they arose.

By the end of the third quarter of 2013, the products of the third tape-out of the Aries 800 have rarely detected bugs and can be declared commercial!

For MOTO Mobile, the design of the new generation of MOTO X has long been based on test chips, and all the functions have been verified on the test machine of the Aries 800 early test chip.

So when the Aries project team announced that it could be commercialized and updated the latest firmware, the MOTO X was also officially finalized, confirming that the Aries 800 was ready to mass-produce the latest model of flagship mobile phone!

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT SUN MOBILE COMPUTING HAS LAUNCHED A FLAGSHIP PHONE WITH ITS OWN MOBILE PROCESSOR AFTER ACQUIRING MOTO X.

Although there aren't many highlights from the test prototype, and the main performance indicators are almost on par with the earlier Snapdragon 800 flagship, considering that this is the first flagship-level chip to catch up with the competition, this achievement is enough to be proud of.

Especially Aries has a slight advantage in terms of power consumption, after all, the main frequency is lower, and the performance at the same main frequency is stronger than the ARM architecture, which makes the MOTO X heat dissipation control very good, and there will be no warm baby effect.

With AMS Semiconductor's latest model of 2GB high-speed low-power memory and 32GB/64GB high-speed flash memory, 3100mAh battery and dual cameras, the specially created low-light clear shooting enLightPro imaging technology, plus a separate audio chip to enhance the music effect.

With the MOTO X with the 4.7-inch screen and the MOTO X pro with the 5-inch screen, it has an amazing performance as soon as it is launched.

This model can be called an all-round master in the flagship machine at the moment, whether it is games, film and television drama playback effects, photo shooting, basically has reached the peak level of mobile phones of the same generation!

Among them, the music and photography are in accordance with the high standards required by Liu Ruoyi, the music effect is not lower than the fruit iPod, and the photo effect is close to the current card digital camera, the realization of this requirement makes the current so-called camera phone and music phone all overshadowed in front of MOTO X!