The surging wave of AI is poised to reshape the semiconductor industry landscape. Chip design, as a core component of the industry, has become a crucial battleground in chip competition. The global chip design industry is highly concentrated. According to TrendForce data, in 2024, the top ten global chip designers generated approximately $249.8 billion in revenue, with the top five companies contributing over 90% of that. Currently, IC design giants such as Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are actively expanding their presence in four key markets: mobile phones, AI PCs, automobiles, and servers. Simultaneously, as AI drives increased demand for high-performance chips, coupled with intensifying market competition, a clear trend towards industry chain collaboration is emerging.
Mobile Phone Market: Flagship Chips Significantly Improve AI Performance
AI and advanced manufacturing processes are becoming key words in the smartphone market, with Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two major mobile SoC manufacturers, vying to launch their latest flagship chips to meet market demand.
Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 8 Ultra chip focuses on performance, AI terminals, and gaming ecosystem. This product uses the second-generation 3nm process (N3E); dual Orion super cores with a main frequency of over 4.2GHz, improving single-core performance by 35%, dedicated to high-load tasks (such as game rendering and AI inference); and six custom performance cores with a main frequency of 3.5GHz, with 40% energy efficiency optimization, responsible for multi-tasking and background management.
To meet the demands of AI computing power, the Snapdragon 8 Ultra integrates the sixth-generation AI engine (Hexagon NPU), with a computing power of 73 TOPS (73 trillion operations per second), a 45% improvement over the previous generation.
In terms of gaming experience, the Snapdragon 8 Ultra features an Adreno 830 GPU, supporting hardware-level ray tracing and global illumination, resulting in a 25% improvement in graphics rendering speed. It also utilizes Snapdragon Elite Gaming technology to achieve variable resolution rendering (VRS) and game super-resolution technology.
In April of this year, MediaTek officially launched the Dimensity 9400+ flagship 5G intelligent AI mobile chip, providing generative AI and intelligent AI capabilities, bringing a new flagship mobile phone experience with its high intelligence, high performance, high energy efficiency and low power consumption.
The Dimensity 9400+ adopts a second-generation all-large core architecture, with an 8-core CPU including one Arm Cortex-X925 super core with a main frequency of up to 3.73GHz, as well as three Cortex-X4 super cores and four Cortex-A720 large cores.
