This article is from WeChat official account:Fresh Date Class (ID: xzclasscom), author: Jun jujube, title figure from: vision China
Time flies so fast, there is still more than a month, and 2020 is about to end.
This year is the first year that domestic 5G networks are fully commercialized. Although we have suffered the impact of the new crown epidemic, the pace of 5G construction has not been affected too much (instead of stimulating).
According to the speech data of Liu Liehong, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology, at the World Internet Conference the day before yesterday, China has now built 700,000 5G base stations, accounting for nearly 70% of the global proportion, and more than 180 million 5G connected terminals. The data provided by the operator shows that the number of domestic 5G package users has exceeded 200 million (China Mobile 129 million, Telecom 72 million , China Unicom has not announced).
In terms of mobile phones, according to the statistics of the Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 183 new models of 5G mobile phones were launched in the domestic market from January to October, with a total of 124 million units shipped, accounting for 49.4%.
There is no doubt that 5G mobile phones have now become the mainstream market and users’ first choice.
Recalling the development history of 5G mobile phones over the years, it is actually not smooth. The disputes surrounding 5G mobile phones have never stopped.
At the beginning, everyone debated “Who is the first 5G mobile phone (chip)“. Later, it began to argue about whether NSA is a fake 5G. Later, they competed for “integrated baseband and external baseband.” Later, there is a dispute over “Is it necessary to support the N79 frequency band”……
For ordinary users who don’t know much about technology, these endless quarrels are really confusing-isn’t it just buying a 5G mobile phone? Why is it so troublesome?
In fact, the main reason for the competition is the immaturity of 5G chip technology. In other words, these are normal phenomena in the early development of 5G mobile phones.
The biggest difference between 5G mobile phones and 4G mobile phones is whether they support 5G networks. The support of the 5G network is mainly determined by the baseband chip of the mobile phone.
Baseband chip (Qualcomm X55)
The baseband chip(sometimes referred to as “baseband”), a bit like the “network card” and “cat(modem)“. And the SoC chip (System-on-a-Chip, System-on-a-Chip, system-on-a-chip) that everyone often talks about is a bit like a computer’s CPU processor .
5G SoC chip (MediaTek)
Note: The baseband chip may not be integrated inside the SoC chip (will be introduced later)
With 5G baseband chips, mobile phones can access 5G networks. Therefore, the development history of 5G mobile phones is actually the development history of 5G chips. The development history of 5G chips is inseparable from the 5G baseband.
Are you dizzy? Don’t worry, let’s start from the beginning.
2016～2018: The first generation of 5G chips
The world’s first 5G baseband chip comes from the old chip giant-Qualcomm (Qualcomm).
Qualcomm released the X50 5G baseband chip in October 2016. At that time, the global 5G standard had not yet been formulated.
Because the launch time is indeed too early, the performance and functions of X50 are relatively weak, mainly used in some testing or verification scenarios. No mobile phone manufacturer dares to use this baseband to mass produce 5G mobile phones.
In February 2018, Huawei released its first 5G baseband at the MWC World Congress in Barcelona-Barong 5G01(Balong 5G01 ). Huawei calls it the world’s first 5G baseband that complies with the 3GPP 5G protocol standard (R15).
Balong 5G01
However, the technology of this 5G01 baseband is not mature enough to be used on mobile phones, only 5G CPE.
CPE: Convert 5G signal to Wi-Fi signalNumber of small devices.
Followingly, MediaTek, Samsung and Intel successively released their own 5G baseband chips (none of them were commercially available at the time) in 2018.
Let’s call these 5G basebands the first generation of 5G basebands.
The data is for reference only (part of it is PPT chip, you know)
This generation of chips has a common feature-they all work with SoC chips through “plug-in methods”.
In other words, the baseband is not integrated into the SoC chip, but is independent of the SoC.
Integrated VS plug-in, of course, the integration is better. The integrated baseband is obviously superior to the external baseband in terms of power consumption control and signal stability.
But there was no way, the technology was immature at that time, so I had to plug it in.
In short, in 2018, 5G mobile phones are basically in a state where there is no “core” available, and there are no commercially released 5G mobile phones on the market.
2019: The second generation of 5G chips
In 2019, things are different.
As the first stage of 5G standard (R15) is determined, the second stage standard (R16), the technologies of various chip manufacturers continue to mature, and the second-generation 5G baseband has begun.
The first action is Huawei.
In January 2019, Huawei released Barong 5000(Balong5000) this brand new 5G baseband . Support SA and NSA, adopt 7nm craft, support multi-mode.
In general, Mr. Xiaozao personally believes that this is the first 5G baseband that has reached the purchase threshold.
Next, Qualcomm released the X55 baseband in February, which also supports SA/NSA, also 7nm, and also supports multi-mode. From the paper data, the X55 index is stronger than Balong5000.
However, Huawei’s actions are morefast.
In July 2019, while the Qualcomm X55 was still in verbal publicity, Huawei adopted the “Kirin 980 + external Balong 5000” solution and released its first 5G mobile phone-Mate20 X 5G. This is also the first 5G mobile phone in China to obtain a network access license.
Because Qualcomm’s X55 cannot be shipped in batches until the first quarter of 2020, a number of mobile phone manufacturers, including Xiaomi, ZTE, and VIVO, could only use Qualcomm SoC chips with external X50 basebands to release their own 5G flagships. .
From an objective point of view, this gap is very obvious if we only look at 5G communication capabilities.
At that time, a lot of controversy broke out around SA and NSA. Many people believe that phones that only support NSA are “fake 5G” phones, and 5G networks will not be available in 2020.
This statement is not accurate. In fact, both NSA and SA are 5G. Under the premise that the SA independent networking is not yet commercially available, only supporting NSA is sufficient.
In September 2019, Huawei released the Kirin 990 5G SoC chip, using the 7nm EUV process, which further widened the gap.
Therefore, for a long period of time in the middle and late stages of 2019, Huawei’s 5G mobile phones have been sold at great prices, and the sales have been extremely high.
On September 4, Samsung released its own 5G SoC, Exynos 980(Orion 980), using 8nm process.
One month later, Samsung released the Exynos 990(Orion 990). Compared with Exynos 980 integrated 5G baseband, Exynos 990 is an external 5G baseband (Exynos Modem 5123), which is puzzling.
Just when everyone felt that the unbalanced situation would continue until the X55 was launched, a dark horse came out, and that was from Taiwan, Taiwan.Chip company-MediaTek (MEDIATEK).
On November 26th, MediaTek released its own 5G SoC chip-Dimensity 1000, which has a comprehensive lead on paper parameters and performance scores, which immediately exploded. Jun Xiaozao also wrote an article introduction at that time: link
On December 5th, the belated Qualcomm finally released its own new 5G SoC chips, namely Snapdragon 765 and Snapdragon 865.
Qualcomm is a major domestic mobile phone manufacturer(except Huawei)‘s main chip supplier. Many manufacturers, including Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, are waiting for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 chip. However, after the launch of Snapdragon 865, everyone found that this chip is still an external baseband. (Snapdragon 765 is an integrated baseband, integrated X52, supports 5G, but the overall performance is weaker than 865, positioning the mid-range.)
Let’s put the SoC chips of these several manufacturers together and compare them:
The paper data at the time (end of 2019) are for reference only
Samsung’s chips are basically used by Samsung phones. In recent years, Samsung’s mobile phone market share in the domestic market has been declining, and has basically withdrawn from the competition for the first camp. Therefore, in the domestic market, Huawei, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are in fierce competition.
Let’s take a look at the parameter differences of these chips at that time:
From the process point of view, several chips are 7nm, but EUV (Extreme Ultra-violet) is stronger than traditional processes.
From the perspective of networking support, NSA and SA are supported by everyone at the same time, so there is nothing to say.
The main difference is focused on baseband plug-in/integration, millimeter wave support, and connection speed.
Baseband plug-in
On this issue, although we said earlier that integration is definitely better than plug-in. But the situation here is a bit special:
Huawei has integrated 5G baseband, andDoes not mean that he is completely stronger than Qualcomm. Part of the reason is that the Huawei Kirin 990 uses the A76 architecture of ARM in 2018(The others are the A77 architecture released by ARM in May 2019). A77 is more difficult to integrate 5G baseband.
Furthermore, Huawei’s integration of 5G baseband has also sacrificed part of its performance. This is one of the reasons why Huawei’s connection rate index is obviously inferior to the other three in the above table.
In other words, with the technology of (end of 2019) at the time, it is very, very important to achieve a perfect balance of performance, power consumption, and integration. difficult.
MediaTek is very good at this. Its Dimensity 1000 not only uses the A77 architecture, but also achieves baseband integration. The overall performance is not inferior to the opponent, which is unexpected.
millimeter wave
Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 does not support integration, partly because of millimeter wave(After supporting millimeter wave, power consumption and volume increase, so there is no way to integrate ).
What is millimeter wave?
5G signals work on the 5G frequency band. The 3GPP standards organization has a clear definition of the 5G frequency band. Divided into two categories, one is below 6GHz(later 3GPP changed to 7.125GHz), we commonly call it Sub-6 frequency band. The other is above 24GHz, commonly known as millimeter wave frequency band.
Why does Qualcomm’s SoC chip support the millimeter wave frequency band?
Because he has to take care of the American market. The US operator AT&T is using the millimeter wave frequency band. Except for a few countries such as the United States, most countries have not yet used millimeter wave 5G.
connection speed
The last thing is to look at the connection speed.
Aside from millimeter waves, we only look at the speed of Sub-6. Dimensity 1000 published data twice as fast as the other two.
There is a reason for this place. Because Dimensity uses dual-carrier aggregation technology to aggregate two 100MHz frequency bandwidths into 200MHz for use, it doubles the rate.
It is worth mentioning that this 100MHz+100MHz is basically tailor-made for China Unicom Telecom’s 5G sharing and co-construction. They both have 100MHz frequency band resources at 3.5GHz.
N79 frequency band support
Finally, let’s talk about the N79. At that time, a lot of war of words broke out around this N79.
As I said earlier, 5G has many frequency bands. The frequency band of Sub-6GHz is as follows:
The N79 frequency band is 4400MHz～5000MHz.
The following is the 5G frequency band distribution of domestic operators:
It’s very clear that China Unicom or Telecom users don’t need to pay attention to N79 because they don’t need it.
Do mobile users have to buy 5G phones that support the N79 band? The answer is: not necessarily. At that time, mobile had not used N79. However, it should be used later.
From the perspective of ordinary consumers, if I am a mobile user, of course I would prefer to buy a 5G mobile phone that supports the N79 frequency band.
In this way, Huawei has an advantage again:
Right? All three have their own merits.
The above is the general situation of each 5G SoC chip at the end of 2019.
2020: 2.5th generation 5G chip
After entering 2020, the release of 5G chips and mobile phones has slowed down due to the impact of the new crown epidemic.
FirstMediaTek is the one that moves.
As we mentioned earlier, MediaTek has released the Dimensity 1000, which has an explosive data sheet on paper. However, later we have not seen the mobile phone equipped with Dimensity 1000 come out, only two models equipped with Dimensity 1000L(Shrinked version of Dimensity 1000)< /span> mobile phone.
On May 7, 2020, after consumers have waited for half a year, MediaTek released an upgraded version of Dimensity 1000 online-Dimensity 1000plus( Dimensity 1000+).
From the information released by MediaTek, the hardware upgrade is not big, mainly through software tuning to improve power consumption, game experience, screen refresh rate, and video quality.
On May 19th, Vivo released the first model equipped with Dimensity 1000Plus chip, iQOO Z1, with a price starting from RMB 2,198.
Qualcomm, on February 12, 2020, at the Samsung S20 conference, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 was officially unveiled. Since then, it has been successively carried on the flagship phones of major mobile phone manufacturers, becoming the mainstream 5G SoC chips in 2020.
Main models equipped with Snapdragon 865 chips in 2020
In October 2020, Huawei released the Kirin 9000 chip along with the Mate 40 Pro. The chip is based on a 5nm process and integrates a 5G baseband (still Barong 5000), performance has been upgraded, and 5G super uplink is supported.(Super Uplink) and downlink carrier aggregation (CA), uplink and downlink rate Significant improvement over other mobile phones.
Due to well-known sanctions, the situation for Huawei’s chips has become increasingly difficult. At the Mate 40 conference, Yu Chengdong said that the Kirin 9000 is likely to be the last generation of Huawei’s Kirin high-end chips.
Also in October, Apple launched the iPhone 12, which is the first iPhone to support 5G. iPhone12 uses its own A14 bionic chip, using TSMC’s 5nm process, with a Qualcomm X55 5G baseband chip attached.
The above is the entire development history of 5G chips so far.
Of course, the story is not over yet.
According to the previously exposed news, MediaTek will soon launch the Dimensity 2000 chip based on the 6nm process (it is said that Huawei P50 may be equipped).
Qualcomm’s 5nm-based Snapdragon 875 is also likely to be released in early December and will be commercially available in Q1 next year. It is said that the Snapdragon 875 will be integrated with Qualcomm and will have been released in February this year.X60 baseband of cloth.
It is worth mentioning Ziguang Zhanrui. Based on the previous Huben T7510, they launched a new 5G mobile phone SoC chip Huben T7520. The chip uses a 6nm EUV process technology and is equipped with a self-developed Ivy 510 5G baseband. It is said that the technology is mature and will be achieved next year (2021) Produce.
Anyway, 2020 is about to end and 2021 is about to start. As the construction of 5G networks continues to deepen, more and more users will embrace 5G. This also means that disputes over 5G mobile phones and chips will intensify.
Who will have the last laugh in this dispute? Only time can tell us the answer…
This article is from WeChat official account: Fresh Jujube Class (ID: xzclasscom) , Author: jujube Jun