[Tianji.com mobile channel].In the blink of an eye, 2023 has come to an end, and although major manufacturers are trying to recover the decline, the overall mobile phone market is still in a sluggish state. But the recession of the market does not mean that there are no bright spots in the mobile phone industry, today I will give you a plate of what "new work" has been done in the industry this year.
"Piercing the sky" technology has been upgraded.
In September last year, Huawei brought the "piercing the sky" technology to the Mate 50 series, becoming the world's first mass smartphone to support Beidou satellite messaging, which can still send smooth messages to the outside world in the absence of terrestrial network signals, and even generate trajectory maps through multiple location information to save users in an emergency. The first civilian use of Beidou satellite information fully demonstrates the strength of China's independent scientific and technological strength. At that time, this "breakthrough" first technology attracted the attention and discussion of the industry and consumers. After a year, although Huawei's Mate 60 series did not hold a press conference, it was caught off guard and went on sale directly, continuing to make breakthroughs in technology, and once again brought surprises to consumers in the "piercing the sky".
The three products of the Mate 60 series are different in terms of satellite communication upgrades, the Mate 60 is the same as the P60 series, which supports two-way Beidou satellite messaging, even if there is no terrestrial network, it can send preset text through the Changlian app, and can receive messages from each other, which is not available on the Mate 50 series last year;The Mate 60 Pro not only supports sending and receiving satellite messages in the absence of a terrestrial network, but also supports Tiantong satellite communication, which can make and receive satellites**, making it the world's first mass smartphone to support satellite callsThe Mate 60 Pro+ supports both Tiantong satellite calls and Beidou satellite messaging, making it the world's first model to use dual satellite communications.
In addition to the re-upgrade of the "piercing the sky" technology, the new Mate60 series also has many points worth paying attention to, such as the return of the Kirin core, the new Harmony0S 4 system, the Xuanwu architecture body, etc., making it a hot flagship mobile phone product at the moment.
Some friends may say that the satellite communication function is indeed very powerful, but for most ordinary users, the probability of using it is very small. This is indeed the case, but because once some things are used, it is likely to save users from danger, just like Mr. Yu said: "Once in a lifetime, once in a lifetime", the more critical point is that Huawei did not make a single satellite** , but in an ordinary mobile phone that everyone can buy to achieve such a function, it can be seen that they really want to make satellite communication a useful and practical function, although it is not used in ordinary times, but it can indeed play an extremely important role when necessary, not the icing on the cake, but a charcoal in the snow.
It is worth mentioning that Huawei has also set off a trend of mobile phone satellite communication, many manufacturers are actively preparing for this aspect, OPPO, Glory and other manufacturers will soon release new machines will be equipped with related functions, you can look forward to it, I believe that more and more products will see the application of "piercing the sky" technology.
The device-side AIGC began to land.
With the popularity of ChatGPT, large models and generative AI have become a topic that cannot be avoided this year, which has greatly expanded the application field of AI and is expected to open a new round of technological and industrial changes. At the same time, with the improvement of terminal AI processing capabilities, it has become possible for generative AI models to run on the smart terminal side, and now everyone's mobile phone is a very suitable carrier, and mobile phone + AIGC has also become a development trend in the mobile phone industry this year.
If you want to deploy the model on the mobile phone and realize the device-side AIGC, it is inseparable from the support of the processor's AI computing power, so whether it is Qualcomm or MediaTek, this point is highlighted on this year's flagship chip. Snapdragon 8 Gen3 is Qualcomm's first mobile platform specifically designed for generative AI, using the new Qualcomm AI Engine, and the heterogeneous architecture brings more powerful AI computing power output. Among them, the Hexagon NPU has upgraded the new microarchitecture, improving performance by 98% and energy efficiency by 40%. The Hexagon NPU integrates a hardware acceleration unit, a miniature block inference unit, a tensor scalar vector unit with enhanced performance, and a large shared memory with 2x the bandwidth of all units.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen3 brings a more powerful generative AI experience, supporting models running 10 billion parameters on the device side and generating up to 20 tokens per second for 7 billion parameter large oracle modelsIt takes less than a second to generate with stable diffusion on the terminal side**.
MediaTek's Dimensity 9300 is equipped with the seventh-generation AI processor APU 790, in Fago's words, it is born for generative AI, the performance of integer arithmetic and floating point arithmetic is 2 times that of the previous generation, the power consumption is 45% lower, and it is the industry's first chip with a built-in hardware-level generative AI engine, which can achieve more high-speed and secure edge AI computing.
MediaTek has also solved the pain points of the current AIGC landing on mobile phones through technological breakthroughs. For example, memory compression technology has reduced the memory occupied by 13 billion large models from 13 GB to 4 GB, and currently supports terminal terminals to run 1 billion, 7 billion, 13 billion, and even 33 billion parameter large modelsIt also deeply adapts the Transformer model and optimizes the SoftMax+LayerNorm operator, which achieves 8 times the processing speed of the previous generation Dimensity 9200, bringing a faster generation rate, with a 7 billion parameter AI large language model generation rate of up to 20 tokens per secondFinally, Neuropilot Fusion, an end-to-end skill expansion technology with LoRa Fusion (Low-Rank Adaptation), can add various new skills on the basis of the basic large model, and expand richer functions through the 1+N model. It is worth mentioning that in addition to the Dimensity 9300, MediaTek's sub-flagship processor Dimensity 8300 is the first in its class to support AIGC, so that the device-side AIGC can be landed on more positioned products and help the popularization of the device-side AIGC.
Of course, in addition to the support at the chip level, if you want to realize the deployment of large models and the landing of AIGC on the end side, you must be inseparable from the carrier of mobile phones, and at present, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, Honor and other manufacturers are also actively embracing AIGC, and how to provide AIGC capabilities to users is the key issue to be considered later. At present, there are actually a lot of things that can be done by AIGC on the device side, such as word creation, text and graphics, exclusive emoji production, voice assistant, etc., and the application scenarios and prospects are very broad.
In addition, compared with the cloud model, the device-side model also has obvious advantages, including because it is local, user information and privacy security are better protected, and it will not be subject to network latency, which can quickly respond to user needs, and the personalized user experience has been greatly improved, and the device-side AIGC can learn and adapt according to the user's language habits, usage preferences and other factors.
AIGC has brought more possibilities to major mobile phone manufacturers, and with its gradual implementation, more and more consumers will experience the new experience brought by AIGC on the device. However, although I personally look forward to and are optimistic about the landing of this technology, it should still be in a stage of trial and exploration in the short term, and AIGC on the mobile phone side still needs more time and scenarios to verify.
The era of CPU all-big cores is coming.
In recent years, when it comes to flagship mobile phone processors, in addition to Qualcomm, MediaTek's name is also inescapable, from Dimensity 9000's global energy efficiency optimization, to Dimensity 9200's hardware-level ray tracing, MediaTek has always been to technological innovation and user experience as the core of continuous progress, and this year, "Fa Ge" on Dimensity 9300 has given everyone a "new life" - all big core.
Looking at the flagship chips of mobile phones over the years, the CPU has slowly come from the very big + small to the super large + large + small, and this time the Dimensity 9300 has broken the convention, pioneering the use of "all large core" CPU, including 4 Cortex X4 super large cores, the highest frequency can reach 325GHz, as well as 4 frequencies up to 20GHz Cortex-A720 large core. With stronger core performance to improve multitasking capabilities, the parallel use experience of multiple applications can easily cope with the dual opening of heavy-duty applications, and can also take into account better battery life. In order to make the "all-big core" CPU not only provide stronger performance, but also reduce power consumption, MediaTek has also made great efforts. On the one hand, the new Cortex X4 ultra-large core and Cortex-A720 large core are upgraded in terms of energy efficiency, and on the other hand, MediaTek's CPU core fully uses out-of-order execution.
The traditional sequential execution of CPU execution instructions is to execute in the order of the program, but in the execution process, due to the dependency between the instructions, some instructions need to wait for the previous instructions to be executed before they can be executed, which will waste the CPU's time. On the other hand, when executing commands, the command is not executed in the order of the program, but according to the dependency between the instructions, the instruction that can be executed immediately is selected first, and the instruction that needs to be waited for is put to be executed later, so as to make full use of the CPU's resources and improve the execution efficiency of the application. Therefore, although the large core consumes more energy, it is more efficient, faster to complete, and has more rest time, so the power consumption spent on the actual task is lower than that of the traditional small core, so as to balance performance and energy efficiency. According to their official data, the Dimensity 9300 has a 15% performance increase at the same power consumption, and its power consumption can be reduced by 33% at the same performance.
Judging from our measured data, the Dimensity 9300 has improved the multi-core performance of Geekbench 6 by 34% compared with the previous Dimensity 9200+, and it is also a little ahead of the opponent Snapdragon 8 Gen3.
In addition to the "all-big-core" CPU, the Dimensity 9300 also has a flagship-level Immortalis-G720 (MC12) GPU, with peak performance increased by 46% compared to the previous generation, and is equipped with a second-generation hardware ray tracing engine that can support 60FPS high-smoothness ray tracingThere is also the APU 790 for generative AI, which has twice the performance of integer operations and floating-point operations of the previous generation, allowing the device-side AIGC to landAs well as the flagship ISP image processor IMAGIQ 990, MediaTek Mir**ISION 990 mobile display processor, dual security chips, and more.
In general, MediaTek's "all-big core" CPU architecture is a very bold attempt, and it is also an innovative exploration in line with future trends, this architecture design with both high performance and high energy efficiency can better meet the dual needs of consumers for mobile phone performance and battery life, and is bound to become a new development direction of future processors, bringing very meaningful changes to the entire industry, both mobile phone manufacturers and ordinary consumers can benefit from it. Of course, for "Fa Ge", there are still difficulties, compared with Qualcomm, which has been deeply involved in the flagship mobile phone market for many years, there are still relatively few products equipped with MediaTek flagship cores, which is not something that can be changed overnight, and it needs to be continuously cultivated, but at least for now, everything is developing in a good direction.
240W fast charging takes it to the next level.
In recent years, mobile phone fast charging technology has developed rapidly, but in the past year, manufacturers also seem to have begun to encounter some bottlenecks. As a manufacturer that continues to make efforts in fast charging, realme has launched a "new activity" at the beginning of this year after the world's first 150W fast charging last year, bringing the world's first mass-produced 240W fast charging.
realme's 240W fast charging can be said to be a complete set of solutions, using three industry-first flash charging technologies. First of all, the new charging architecture is upgraded, using three 100-watt charge pumps to work together, and through a special parallel shunt design, the whole machine can achieve balanced heat dissipation, and finally achieve the best temperature rise performance. This architecture has a charging conversion efficiency of up to 985%。
Then there is the industry's first 12A customized charging cable, compared with the industry's largest 10A current charging cable scheme, the core material of the realme 240W solution uses 4 21AWG industry's highest specification thick copper wires, and the single core area exceeds 778%, the carrying current is larger. The interface position is double-layer platinum electrophoresis USB-C, which can effectively reduce the impedance between the core and the interface, so that the charging efficiency is higher.
Finally, the first 240W dual gallium nitride mini charger adopts a dual GAN design with a power density of 234W CC, which should be the strongest in the industry at the moment. And to better control the temperature of the charger, realme has also innovated from the circuit design and structural design, using a discrete heat source circuit design, so that the heating device is separated by a certain distance, and the heat can be firmly formed through the fully sealed aerogel insulation film, so that the heat can reach the surface of the charger slowly and evenly, and at the same time, it is adjusted with a new balanced shell temperature heat diffusion algorithm, and finally realizes a safe charger feel temperature.
As for the battery life that many people are concerned about, realme said that the 240W flash charge is the industry's first "longevity flash charge" of over 200W, and the effective capacity of the battery is not less than 80% after reaching 1600 complete charging cycles.
Through full-link innovation, realme will achieve the world's first 240W fast charging, and on the realme GT Neo5, it can achieve 2 hours of calls in 30 seconds, and it can be fully charged in less than 10 minutes, consumers can really feel the experience improvement brought by the new technology.
I have to say,realme is really fierce in fast charging,In recent years, from the popularization of 65W at the price of 1-2K to the impact of 80W,And then to the first 150W in the industry,This year, it is the first to achieve 240W,It can be called the "volume king" of the mobile phone fast charging industry,From the perspective of experience, it can indeed bring some improvement to users,Fast charging is also a "gripper" in the mobile phone market,Consumers will consider this factor when purchasing products,But I think it has not become a decisive factor,And brand、Performance、System、 Compared with image and other factors, it is a little behind, the experience gap is not very large, and the user is not so necessary for this demand, the impact of fast charging on consumer purchase is relatively small, and it is definitely not enough to let consumers pay for this alone.
500-meter thermal imaging is hard enough.
The time when the AGM brand was more out of the circle was when "Wolf Warrior 2" was released in 2017, Wu Jing used that mobile phone was AGM S9, many people called it "Wolf Warrior Mobile Phone", this niche and hardcore brand entered everyone's field of vision. And every year when it comes to the end of the year, I always think of this brand, after all, it can always give everyone a new and ruthless job. AGM's G1S Pro last year can be used as a thermal imager, and this year's G2 GT takes it a step further.
AGM G2 GT's thermal imaging range has been increased from 50 meters to 500 meters in the previous generation, this wave has directly changed from a thermal imager to a thermal imaging magnifier, this technology detects organisms within a radius of hundreds of meters, and the thermal sensitivity has also been improved from the previous generation50MK to 60MK, which can better perceive temperature changes, and it also has a thermal resolution of 256 192 and a thermal refresh rate of 25Hz, surpassing many professional thermal imagers in thermal imaging. The AGM G2 GT can quickly carry out search and rescue missions at night, observe wild animals and maintain a safe distance, and engage in security work, which can detect people, fire sources and more.
It was also the first focused thermal imaging phone. Focusable thermal imaging has a focus motor that locks the focus and makes the thermal image clearer. At the software level, AGM also brings thermal imaging applications20: Thermal AGM, built-in very rich functions and setting options, such as multiple color palettes, contrast brightness, image mode, temperature setting, temperature alarm, etc., to help users better use.
Thermal imaging this function,It is indeed not much use for ordinary users,But for those who are engaged in outdoor adventures or engaged in security, it is very necessary,AGMThe hard-core and niche three-proof mobile phone is for these users,Professional and targeted is very strong。 In fact, you can also think of it as a professional thermal imager with mobile phone functions, which seems to be more suitable. Finally, I think it's very good for the mobile phone industry to have AGM, a manufacturer that focuses on niche markets, after all, although some needs are niche, they are very necessary, and they can get the market to meet the core needs of these people, which is destined to be small, but it can also be beautiful.
Write at the end. As mentioned at the beginning, although the overall market is still sluggish, both chip manufacturers and mobile phone manufacturers want to make the mobile phone industry recover through some "new activities". Judging from the current trend, device-side AIGC, satellite communication, and CPU all-large core architecture should become the focus of the mobile phone industry in 2024, and continuous innovation and exploration are still the driving force for progress.