The last issue of "Mobile Phone Core Matters" explained to everyone the basic pattern of mobile phone chips last year. When explaining Qualcomm and MediaTek, we briefly talked about why the core Snapdragon 820 is more pragmatic, but it seems more The nuclear MediaTek X10 is not high-end. Today we will further explain what a good mobile phone chip looks like. When we face the marketing bombardment of various core numbers, how to rationally choose the most suitable products for ourselves is an important issue.
CPU is important but not allCPU (Central Processing Unit) is the most familiar parameter to everyone. From the name, we can see its importance to the chip, and even many people directly equate it with the entire chip. In fact, the more accurate name of the mobile phone chip is the system on chip (SoC), the CPU is only a part of it, is responsible for the control calculation, and directly determines the smooth operation of the mobile phone.
To judge the performance of a CPU, most ordinary consumers are biased by various undisciplined marketing and offline salespersons who are half-knowledgeable. They only care about how many cores and how high the frequency is, but these are only the final performance. Part of the core decisive factor is the architecture!
At present, mainstream SoCs, regardless of their origin, adopt almost all ARM's simplified instruction set architecture. The difference is that powerful manufacturers only use the company's ARMv7/v8 instruction set, and will carry out architectural design themselves, such as Apple and Qualcomm is a typical representative. Since the beginning of A6, Apple has begun to design its own CPU architecture. A year later, A7 has become the first 64-bit mobile processor with the Cyclone architecture, leading the industry by one year. In the 32-bit era, Qualcomm relied on the ARMv7 instruction set. The Krait architecture established its status as the best in the world, and the latest Snapdragon 820 has built a new architecture Kryo based on ARMv8.
Another solution is to directly purchase the public version of the architecture designed by ARM. Our common Cortex-A7/A8/A9/A53/A57/A72 is the name of the architecture designed by ARM. Among them, the one-digit number after the letter A is the 32-bit ARMv7 instruction set, and the two-digit number is the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. MediaTek and HiSilicon adopt the public version of the solution.
To give a vivid example, the first solution is like ARM laying a solid foundation. Manufacturers can freely choose how to build a house. The advantage is that it is flexible, and performance and power consumption are often better controlled than the public version of the architecture, but it is less costly and time-consuming. , Technology has higher requirements. The second solution is equivalent to ARM not only laying the foundation, but also drawing the drawings. After the manufacturer has bought it, he only needs to construct according to the drawings, which can greatly reduce the time and cost of the entire SoC chip development.
Different architectures directly determine the basis of performance. For example, although the common processors in thousands of yuan machines on the market have eight cores and clocked at more than 2GHz, their performance is not as good as dual-core high performance due to the use of A53 low-power architecture. Architecture A72, especially in single-threaded computing power, pales in comparison. This is the fundamental reason why Apple insists on the dual-core option, but the performance has been far ahead.
In fact, this is the same as a computer processor. Intel’s famous TIck-Tock strategy is to focus on alternate improvements in architecture and process technology in different years, and finally achieve performance increases year by year. So in addition to the architecture, the most important thing is the process technology.
The process technology refers to the distance between the circuit in the chip and the circuit. The current mainstream technology is 28nm and 20nm, and the most advanced is 16/14nm. Advanced technology can reduce the processor's energy and heat, reduce the chip area, and improve performance . Understand this, you can know why the big.LITTLE core architecture of the same 4 A57+4 A53, the 20nm process of the Snapdragon 810 heat and power consumption has been criticized, while the 14nm Samsung Exynos 7420 has excellent performance. .
To be more detailed, the semiconductor manufacturing process can also be divided into 2D structure MOSFET (metal oxide half field effect transistor) and 3D structure FinFET (fin field effect transistor). The FinFET architecture mainly changes the gate that controls the current. Significantly improve circuit control and reduce leakage current.
Even if it is the same process technology, there may be iterations due to technological improvements. For example, last year’s Apple A9 foundry turmoil, theoretically more advanced 14nm performance is not as good as TSMC’s 16nm. The reason is that Samsung jumped directly from 28nm to 14nm LPE process, while TSMC went step by step from 28-20-16nm. The technology is relatively mature, and the yield and leakage control are better. However, Samsung has obviously learned its lesson. Recently, it launched the second-generation 14nm LPP process, which has a performance increase of 15% and a 15% reduction in power consumption compared to the first-generation LPE process. TSMC also launched an improved version of 16nm FinFET+ this year, so it seems the same process. There are also differences due to different versions.
After the above description, I believe that everyone already knows how to judge the quality of the CPU. In summary, the architecture and technology are more important than the core and main frequency, and the high-performance architecture is significantly better than the low-power architecture. The more advanced the processor, the more Strong.
Game core-GPUA good CPU is only the first step to make a high-end chip. Although it allows the whole machine to run smoothly and stably, today, as the entertainment properties of mobile phones are getting stronger and stronger, especially young people like to use mobile phones instead of handhelds to play games. Nowadays, GPU is undoubtedly the more important part.
The Chinese translation of GPU into a graphics processor is related to the strength of graphics rendering capabilities and directly determines whether the game can run smoothly. At present, the mainstream mobile GPU manufacturers include ARM, Qualcomm, ImaginaTIon Technologies (hereinafter referred to as ImaginaTIon), and NVIDIA. Among them, Qualcomm's Adreno and NVIDIA's Maxwell GPUs are only used on their own Snapdragon and Tegra chips, so only ARM is sold. Mali, ImaginaTIon PowerVR two series.
Although there are often rumors that Samsung and Apple are self-developed GPUs, so far, chip manufacturers can only purchase solutions provided by ARM or Imagination to integrate them into the chip. For example, Huawei HiSilicon and Samsung Exynos use the ARM Mali series, while Imagination PowerVR is more used. In Apple A series and MediaTek chips.
Due to the different architectures adopted by different manufacturers, such as unified rendering, separate rendering, etc., the architecture or core alone cannot determine the performance of mobile GPUs. The industry’s usual practice is to look at its triangular output rate and pixel fill rate. Of course, since After all kinds of evaluation software were born, the comparison became more intuitive. It’s okay if you can’t remember the various rankings, and you know the naming rules of each manufacturer.
Generally speaking, the names of mobile GPUs are composed of letters and numbers, such as Adreno 530, Mali-T880, PowerVR GT7600, etc. The first digit generally represents algebra, the larger the number, the newer the algebra; the second digit represents positioning , The higher the number, the stronger the performance. The above three GPUs are the latest and highest-end models that have been commercially available. However, ARM's Mali GPU is a bit special. In addition to looking at the model, you have to pay attention to the number of cores (the last MPx is named, and the number of cores is represented by x). For example, Kirin 950 and Exynos 8890 both use the latest Mali-T880 , But Kirin 950 has only 4 cores, while Exynos 8890 has 12 cores, and the performance is naturally different.
Communication hub-basebandThe core function of a mobile phone is communication. For this, no matter how powerful the CPU and GPU are, there is nothing that can be done. In the end, it depends on the baseband.
The baseband directly determines what kind of network standard the mobile phone supports. We use the mobile phone to make calls, surf the Internet, send text messages, etc., all of which are issued to the baseband part through the upper processing system, and the baseband part is processed and executed. It can be said that the baseband is the most technical part of the entire chip. Manufacturers such as Texas Instruments, ST Ericsson, NVIDIA, etc. are mostly eliminated from the market because of the lack of integrated baseband in the SoC or the backward technology.
The most intuitive point of judging the quality of baseband is to see how many standards and frequency bands it supports. Generally, mobile phones known as all Netcom use high-end basebands, from 4G LTE to 3G WCDMA/CMDA/TD-SCDMA to 2G GSM /EDGE supports all formats, users only need to purchase a mobile phone card to use, without worrying about whether to support it or what to do if the card is changed.
In addition to standard support, another important feature of baseband in the 4G era is the UE access capability level of LTE, that is, the transmission rate that the UE can support. It is generally represented by Cat x. The larger the number of x, the higher the upload and download speed. One of the regrets of Kirin 950 is that it uses the old baseband Balong 720 that only supports Cat 6, but it does not use the latest Balong 750 that supports Cat 12/13.
Speaking of baseband, this is Qualcomm's strength. Qualcomm integrated the baseband in the first generation of Snapdragon processor S1 many years ago, simplifying the development of mobile phones and speeding up the cycle. The latest Snapdragon 820 integrated X12 LTE baseband not only supports full Netcom, but also has the highest LTE access capability, Cat 12/13.
Multimedia performanceConsumers who pay a little attention to the electronic field of the above three big items still know a little bit. In contrast, other multimedia performance in SoC is not very conspicuous. Here we classify and introduce to you.
The first is the video encoder, which is related to the number of encoding and decoding schemes that the mobile phone ultimately supports. For example, ARM's Mali-V550 and Snapdragon 820 both support the encoding and decoding of 4K resolution H.265 HEVC format video. Some SoCs will also integrate audio decoders, such as MediaTek.
Next is the display controller, which affects how high resolution and frame rate the mobile phone can be. The Mali-DP650, released by ARM only two days ago, can easily bring up a 4K resolution and 60FPS frame rate screen. There is no problem in using it on 4K TVs except for mobile devices.
Finally, there is an image processor (ISP) related to photos and videos. It is responsible for processing the data returned by the image sensor, affecting various basic and advanced image functions such as white balance, focus, exposure, noise suppression, face recognition, and motion compensation. The most famous in this field is the Fujitsu Milbeaut solution favored by Samsung and Hammer. However, adding ISP alone will increase the complexity of power consumption, heat generation, and design. Therefore, manufacturers are more inclined to integrate ISP in SoC, such as Qualcomm, HiSilicon, Apple's chips are all integrated self-developed technologies.
In addition to the four aspects of CPU, GPU, baseband, and multimedia, there are many other components in SoC, such as co-processor, power management, I/O connection, etc., which seem to be ignored, but ultimately determine whether the mobile phone can be charged quickly. , Does it support the latest LPDDR4/UFS 2.0 storage solution, whether WiFi is stable, etc. Therefore, when purchasing a mobile phone, ordinary consumers should not only look at the number of cores in the CPU, but should consider the graphics, communication, and multimedia performance in a comprehensive manner. Don't be led by the manufacturer's marketing. As far as this year is concerned, the high-end chips that have already appeared are HiSilicon Kirin 950, and the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, Samsung Exynos 8890 and MediaTek Helio X20. You can pay special attention when buying products.
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