The surging wave of artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to reshape the semiconductor industry. Chip design, as one of the core components of the industry, has become a crucial battleground for chip competition. The global chip design industry is highly concentrated. TrendForce data shows that the top ten global chip design companies will generate a combined revenue of approximately $249.8 billion in 2024, with the top five contributing over 90% of the total. Currently, IC design giants such as NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are actively developing their presence in four key markets: mobile phones, AI PCs, automobiles, and servers. At the same time, as AI drives demand for high-performance chips and market competition intensifies, there is a clear trend toward collaborative collaboration within the industry chain.
Mobile phone market: Flagship chip AI performance has been greatly improved
AI and advanced processes are becoming keywords in the smartphone market. Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two major mobile phone SoC manufacturers, are competing to launch the latest flagship chips to meet market demand.
Qualcomm's flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition, focuses on performance, AI terminals, and gaming ecosystems. It uses the second-generation 3nm process (N3E). It features dual Oryon super-cores with a main frequency exceeding 4.2GHz, a 35% improvement in single-core performance, and is dedicated to high-load tasks (such as game rendering and AI reasoning). It also has six customized performance cores with a main frequency of 3.5GHz and a 40% energy efficiency optimization, responsible for multi-tasking and background management.
To meet the AI computing power requirements, the Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition integrates the sixth-generation AI engine (Hexagon NPU) with a computing power of 73 TOPS (73 trillion operations per second), an increase of 45% over the previous generation.
In terms of gaming experience, the Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition is equipped with the Adreno 830 GPU, which supports hardware-level ray tracing and global illumination, and improves graphics rendering speed by 25%. Through Snapdragon Elite Gaming technology, it enables variable resolution rendering (VRS) and game super-resolution technology.
In April this year, MediaTek officially launched the Dimensity 9400+ flagship 5G intelligent AI mobile chip, providing generative AI and intelligent AI capabilities, bringing a new experience to flagship mobile phones with high intelligence, high performance, high energy efficiency and low power consumption.
The Dimensity 9400+ adopts the second-generation all-big core architecture. The 8-core CPU includes 1 Arm Cortex-X925 super core with a main frequency of up to 3.73GHz, as well as 3 Cortex-X4 super cores and 4 Cortex-A720 large cores.
