Where has the enterprising spirit of Snapdragon and Kirin gone as their performance has stagnated?

In recent days, everyone's attention has been focused on full-screen displays. Even the blockbuster product Kirin 970 released a few days ago has been overshadowed by products such as Xiaomi MIX. What many people have not noticed is that there has been a lot of news about Snapdragon 836/845 in recent days.

However, the fact that Snapdragon and Kirin have lost their limelight to full-screen displays cannot be blamed on the other parties being too strong. A good iron must be hard to forge, but this generation of flagship processors does not seem to be that strong. The stagnant performance makes people wonder: What happened to Huawei, Samsung and Qualcomm?

CPU performance has reached a deadlock?

In fact, when Kirin 970 was released at the beginning of this month, this site introduced the performance of this processor. Huawei did not emphasize the performance improvement when introducing Kirin 970, but said that the energy efficiency was improved by 20%, because the CPU of Kirin 970 is almost exactly the same as Kirin 960, both of which are quad-core Cortex A73 + quad-core Cortex A53, and the frequency is still 2.4GHz for the big core and 1.8GHz for the small core.

So if we simply compare performance, the Kirin 970 and 960 are still not that far apart. And embarrassingly, this situation also occurs in Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895.

We have also compared the performance of Snapdragon 835 before, and finally found that except for the multi-core performance which was improved by 50% compared with Snapdragon 821 (4 more cores), other performance remained stagnant. Compared with 8890, the multi-core and single-core performance of Exynos 8895 was also limited.

In fact, in terms of image performance, the GPU performance of Kirin 970, Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895 have been greatly improved, which is obviously in preparation for high-definition video, more powerful games, and AR/VR technology.

But what is most puzzling is that the running scores of these brands’ flagship processors have been maintained at 2000 for single-core and 6000+ for multi-core for a long time. Has a small upgrade of the CPU become a consensus in the industry?

Stagnation in performance is reasonable

Let's talk about the performance of SoC first. The stagnation of CPU performance is not only reflected in manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Huawei. Even ARM has slowed down. Let's not talk about things too far away. The Cortex-A72 has an 80% performance improvement over its previous generation Cortex-A series architecture A57, the last two generations. However, the upgrade from A72 to A73 and then to A75 only increased by 30%.

In addition to ARM, various manufacturers are no longer very interested in performance. In fact, in addition to architecture, core and frequency, the improvement of process for processor is not just in energy consumption. In fact, under the same volume, more transistors can be put in after the process is improved.

This can actually improve CPU performance, but several recent flagships have chosen not to increase transistors, but instead to reduce their size.

So all these phenomena point to one conclusion: almost all upstream and downstream manufacturers feel that the current processor performance is sufficient. Indeed, now mobile phones are actually the same as PCs. The impact of storage devices on the experience is even greater than that of CPUs. The experience of UFS 2.1 plus a mid-range processor may be better than that of eMMC plus a flagship processor, just like i7+mechanical hard drive is not as good as i5+SSD. There is another example that best reflects the performance of mobile processors. Qualcomm said that Snapdragon 835 will soon be used in Windows notebooks!

Finally, to summarize, the performance of CPUs has skyrocketed again and again because manufacturers have been aggressively stacking materials in terms of architecture, core, and frequency, so we have also experienced a golden age of doubling the number of processors in a generation, and when the process is improved, the priority is to increase the number of transistors rather than reduce the size of the chip.

Now that the performance has finally been accumulated enough, manufacturers have begun to deal with other issues, so the editor believes that the stagnation of flagship processor performance may continue for a long time.

But this does not mean that SoC will not improve

Does this mean that if we buy a flagship phone now, we will be guaranteed to be up-to-date for many years? Of course not. Performance is no longer everything for a phone. After all, a mobile processor is a SoC. In addition to the CPU and GPU, there are many other chips that can have a great impact on the experience.

For example, ISP, DSP, baseband, AI, fast charging support, etc., ARM does not provide ready-made solutions for these things like architecture, so in recent years, many semiconductor manufacturers have focused more on these contents.

Take the baseband for example. The biggest weakness of Samsung Exynos has always been that it does not support full network access, and currently Exynos 8895 still does not support telecommunications networks, but Exynos 9810 will integrate a full network access baseband for the first time.

As a manufacturer at the forefront of 5G technology, Huawei uses a new 1.2 Gigabit baseband on the latest Kirin 970. As for MediaTek, which lags behind, it has also upgraded several recent P series processors to LTE Cat.10, which is very close to Qualcomm's leading LTE Cat12/Cat13.

In addition to the parts that have always been in SoC such as baseband and ISP, more and more chips have been stuffed into SoC in recent years. The most typical ones are of course independent HiFi chips and security encryption chips. Their addition has greatly enhanced the audio and video performance and security of mobile phones.

But manufacturers obviously do not intend to stop. Huawei has stuffed AI chips into the Kirin 970, and this will obviously be a technology that all semiconductor manufacturers will follow in the next stage.

In fact, the bucket effect is very obvious on today's mobile processors. Simply lengthening the performance board can no longer satisfy consumers. The direction of the industry is to lengthen each board of the bucket.

So in the future, even if the performance does not increase significantly, we will not be able to use a mobile phone for a longer time, because after a few years, you will find that you don’t have the functions that other mobile phones have. This experience must be more painful than insufficient performance, right?

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.