One core is in trouble, nine cores are waiting to see which mobile phone CPU is the best?

Over the past few decades, the semiconductor industry has worked hard to follow Moore's Law, and our PC performance has continued to improve. However, in recent years, as PC processor manufacturing processes have gradually approached the process limits, the speed of personal computer performance improvement seems to have slowed down, and some people believe that Moore's Law on PCs may soon become invalid...

However, the above concerns do not seem to exist for the mobile phone controllers that are developing in full swing - especially in recent years, the "nuclear war" of mobile phone controllers has intensified, especially the rapid efforts of domestic manufacturers, which has made many people excited.

In the "nuclear war" of 2017, Chinese manufacturers will occupy half of the market

At the end of 2015, HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor was launched, taking the throne of CPU performance of mobile application processors, which became a major event in the domestic mobile phone industry at that time. At the end of last year, its successor Kirin 960 once again refreshed the CPU performance record of domestic and even global mobile phone SoCs. Although its Mali G71MP8 GPU, also known as the "graphics card", is still not very high in performance, it has been nearly doubled compared to the previous generation, and it is no longer a big problem to cope with existing 3D mobile games. It is rumored that the newly released Huawei P10 mobile phone will be equipped with a slightly modified Kirin 965 main control, which is mainly optimized in power consumption, making this domestic strongest mobile phone SoC more competitive.

As a representative of self-developed motherboards, Samsung's Exynos motherboards not only have a longer "history", but are also slightly better in technology: the latest Exynos 8895 is scheduled to be equipped on the Galaxy S8 in some regions, using Samsung's self-developed "Mongoose M2" architecture and equipped with a Mali-G71 MP20 graphics processor, but running at a lower frequency to save power - despite this, it is enough to be called the most powerful "stacked" motherboard to be released. Unfortunately, like the Kirin 96x series, Exynos will not be used by many manufacturers. In addition to Samsung itself, it is foreseeable that Meizu (and perhaps Lenovo) will be the only one to use it.

The above two are relatively niche, but the third player that will compete with them for the performance throne in 2017 is really "popular" - that is Qualcomm, and its Snapdragon 82x and 835. After Qualcomm was cheated by ARM's public version architecture in the Snapdragon 810 era, its flagship products have all been self-architected: Snapdragon 835 uses an improved Kyro280 architecture, and the number of cores has returned to eight cores. Most importantly, as the industry's first 10nm process mobile phone SOC, Snapdragon 835 has lower power consumption than the highly praised Snapdragon 820!

HiSilicon, Samsung and Qualcomm are basically firmly in the top three in terms of comprehensive performance of mobile phone main control in 2017 (but the specific ranking is hard to say now). Compared with them, there are two other Chinese manufacturers who are also participating in the industry "nuclear war", one of which is now a little "obsessed", while the other is a fledgling with a bright future.

The company that has gone too far is MediaTek. In recent years, they have been promoting the concept of "more cores means better" and have launched controllers with more and more cores, but the market response has been very mediocre. The high-end Helio X series has never been able to make progress, and at the end of last year, many mid- and low-end orders were snatched away by Qualcomm Snapdragon 625. Life has not been easy. This year, MediaTek's flagship X30 series is still a "10-core" design, with a super high theoretical frequency, but the GPU and memory subsystems are still weak, and the user experience is questionable.

The "newcomer" is naturally the "Pinecone" controller that has recently caused a lot of discussion. This domestic controller, which will be exclusively equipped on the Xiaomi 5c mobile phone, uses an eight-core Cortex A53 design and a GPU using a Mali T860mp4. The overall performance is said to be close to that of Snapdragon 808, and the 3D performance is even close to that of Exynos8890 (AnTuTu 3D running score exceeds 20,000, which is twice that of Kirin 950)! Of course, Xiaomi's positioning of its first controller in the Xiaomi 5c, which is priced above 1,000 yuan, rather than the Redmi series, has already shown its attitude of aiming at the high-end in the future - this is quite similar to Huawei's HiSilicon K3V2 back then.

In general, in the mid-to-high-end smartphone market in 2017, we will see five different solutions competing on the same stage, more than half of which are Chinese manufacturers - this has to be said to be quite proud.

We are all children of ARM, but we can’t tell them apart

But with so many choices, sometimes it can be confusing: main frequency, number of cores, architecture... I can't tell them apart, especially architecture: A8, A9, A15, A53, A57, A72, A73... Everyone probably feels dizzy just by hearing these words. We all know that architecture has a great impact on CPU performance, but how big is it? For architectures with different names, does the "bigger the number", the higher the performance?

First of all, let me tell you, it’s not.

...To explain the concept of mobile phone processor architecture, we have to introduce a manufacturer: ARM (Chinese name: Anmou). As the "father" of all the mobile phone processors and mobile phone manufacturers listed above, ARM does not manufacture mobile phone SoCs itself. It only makes a basic design and then sells this design to major manufacturers to manufacture processors themselves.

These so-called "processor architectures" are simply the names given by ARM to each "version" of its design. However, ARM obviously has no talent for naming, and with so many names for these architectures, consumers can easily be confused.

In order to explain the differences in the positioning of these architectures, we have specially made this diagram: the horizontal axis is the release time (the later the release, the "newer"), and the vertical axis is the performance positioning - note that positioning only indicates the field that the architecture is suitable for, and it is not necessarily equal to the actual performance. For example, A53 and A72 can actually be used in large-scale servers, but mobile phone manufacturers want to use them to make high-end mobile phone CPUs. As a result, the power consumption is too high and the frequency cannot be increased. The actual performance may not be better than the A73, which has a lower positioning but also lower power consumption. Of course, in fact, A73 is a mobile phone-specific architecture based on the "64-bit" A12 architecture developed by the team that originally developed A12 (later renamed A17) after ARM saw that the power consumption of major manufacturers was still too high. It is more energy efficient than A57 and A72, but its positioning is much lower than the former two...

Choose the mobile phone master control wisely: I am proud of my posture

After reading the analysis of the name of the ARM public version architecture, do you feel a sense of sudden enlightenment? However, Qualcomm and Samsung have started using self-developed architectures for several generations. How do their CPUs compare to the ARM public version design? In fact, whether it is Qualcomm or Samsung, in order to ensure compatibility with mainstream software, even if the main control is self-developed, it will not be too "advanced", and it can basically be regarded as half a generation ahead of the ARM public version. The only manufacturers that have really completely left ARM behind and engaged in original design are Apple and NVIDIA... Although the performance is super high, one is confined to a closed system ecosystem, and the other simply gave up the mobile phone market and switched to smart cars and supercomputers. However, whether it is based on a "minor modification" of the public version architecture or a completely independent original, being able to have self-developed design still means that it is more than one level higher than other manufacturers. In this regard, we have to admire Samsung and Qualcomm.

Of course, for consumers, on the one hand, they need to improve their posture... no, knowledge reserves, to prevent being cheated by unscrupulous merchants; however, at the same time, there is no need to pursue "flagship performance", but to make wise judgments based on their own needs and financial strength. For example, for users who don't play games but often watch TV series, or business people who are particularly concerned about standby time, a Snapdragon 625 or MediaTek P10 phone is far more practical than a "flagship running score". For those mobile gamers, even if they are all flagship-level controllers, the performance of graphics may vary greatly.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.