Nearly two months after independence, on January 11, @GloryMobile’s official Weibo finally announced the release time of the flagship new product, the Honor V40. This is also the first work of Honor after its independence, so it has received extensive attention from the industry – without the new glory of Kirin, Which processor will you choose? At present, there are MediaTek’s Dimensity 1000+ (7nm), Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 (5nm), etc., but the recent 5nm processor power consumption “rollover” incident…
Huawei, which was hit by the “chip ban”, had to rescue itself in 2020 and sell the Honor mobile phone business as a whole. The Honor mobile phone, which was forced to be fully independent, has now completely distanced itself from Huawei, which also means that the new Honor mobile phone released in the future will not be affected by the US “chip ban”. Sourcing third-party products to survive.
Since the official signing of the agreement on November 17, 2020, New Honor has been independent for nearly two months. On January 11, @GloryMobile’s official Weibo finally announced that the flagship new product Honor V40 will be released at 14:30 on January 18. This is also the first work of Honor after independence, so it has received extensive attention from the industry – without the new glory of Kirin , Which processor will you choose to carry?
Medium, large, and extra large cups may use different processors
According to industry insiders, the upcoming Honor V40 series of mobile phones will still have three versions, namely Honor V40 (Medium Cup), Honor V40 Pro (Large Cup), and Honor V40 Pro+ (Super Cup). According to multiple media reports, the first two versions will use the MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ processor. This product was released in early May 2020 and uses TSMC’s 7nm process, which is an upgraded version of the previous flagship chip Dimensity 1000.
Related reading: “MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ released: 144Hz screen refresh, 5G+5G dual card dual standby”
It is said that the reason why the Honor V40 uses the Dimensity 1000+ processor is said to be because some pig teammates took the Honor V40 to the GameBench for a run, and then the GameBench official website released the Honor V40 “Peace Elite (90 frames)” game Frame rate evaluation report. The report shows that the GPU model of the Honor V40 is Mali-G77MC9, which proves that the Honor V40 does use the Dimensity 1000+ chip, but the specific version is unknown.
However, MediaTek has confirmed that it will hold a new product launch conference on January 20 to release the new Dimensity series chips. At present, the product model has not been announced, but according to the news of Taiwan Business Times, the new generation of flagship 5G chip will be named Dimensity 1200, and the technology has been upgraded from TSMC 7nm to 6nm, and it has been mass-produced. Xiaomi is the most popular among domestic mobile phone manufacturers to grab chips for the first launch. Judging from the previous cooperation between MediaTek and Xiaomi, this 6nm processor is very likely to be handed over to Redmi for the first launch.
At this time, if Honor still uses the previous generation Dimensity 1000+, it will indeed look a bit outdated, and it will be overwhelmed by Redmi.
The original Kirin 9000 may be replaced by the Snapdragon 888
So everyone’s attention is focused on the “super cup” – Honor V40 Pro+, which was originally planned to use the Kirin 9000 processor, but after the ban on TSMC’s 5nm production, the “super cup” available without cores was temporarily suspended. On December 10 last year, according to a report from “Deep Web”, a source close to Qualcomm said that the progress of negotiations between Qualcomm and Honor is very optimistic, and the two sides are close to reaching a supply cooperation.
In response to this news, at the 2020 Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm President Ammon said that he had started a dialogue with Honor. He said: “I like the vitality of China Mobile’s ecosystem very much, and I look forward to cooperating with Honor in related aspects.”
If all goes well, it is expected that the Honor V40 Pro+ will be equipped with the 5nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 flagship processor to return and directly target the Xiaomi Mi 11. However, since the new Honor got this chip late, the launch time of the “Super Cup” version will also be delayed, and it is expected to be officially released after the Chinese New Year, while the Medium Cup and Big Cup versions will be equipped with MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ processor, released as scheduled on January 18.
What’s even more outrageous is that there is actually a list of configuration and price of the Honor V40 series circulating on the Internet. The super-sized cup model is not only equipped with the same processor as the Xiaomi Mi 11, but also the same as the Xiaomi Mi 11 in terms of price. As soon as Honor came to life, it chose to directly leverage Xiaomi. However, in the context of the current price increase of mobile phones caused by the shortage of chips, domestic manufacturers can reduce the price of 5G mobile phones through competition, which can benefit consumers.
In addition to Xiaomi Mi 11, several brands including IQoo, Black Shark, and Redmi have recently announced that they will soon release mobile phones equipped with the Snapdragon 888 processor. It can be seen that the flagship mobile phone market this year will be dominated by 5nm technology.
The first generation of 5nm mobile processors collectively overturned?
Although the 5nm processor is new, is the price/performance ratio necessarily high? Two days ago, we just published an article on the dismantling of Xiaomi Mi 11. Judging from the comments of digital bloggers, the heat generation of the Snapdragon 888 is still considerable. This is also a topic that has been discussed a lot in the industry before: 5nm processors have collectively overturned! It is reported that the first batch of 5nm mobile processors also underperformed in addition to the general overheating problem.
Related reading: “Teardown and comparison of Xiaomi Mi 11 and 10: Besides the Snapdragon 888 and 865, what are the differences? 》
Comparison of 5nm mobile SoCs that have been mass-produced (Figure from: Network)
The earliest 5nm processors released were Apple’s A14 and Huawei’s Kirin 9000. Samsung’s 5nm Orion came a little late, because when TSMC produced 5nm, Samsung’s own process still faced some difficulties, which prevented the processor from being produced. It was not until the second half of 2020 that Samsung mass-produced the 5nm process processor Exynos 1080. Just in the early morning of today (January 13), Samsung officially released a new generation of flagship mobile phone chip Exynos 2100 at CES 2021. 5nm process flagship mobile processor.
In fact, in the process of jumping from 7nm to 5nm, all chip manufacturers are “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. Previously, there was news that the 5nm A14 processor on the iPhone 12 series also had a heat problem, and one night’s standby was to exceed the 15% electricity.
At this point, high power consumption is actually a tradition of Apple’s A series. In recent years, the A-series processors have been the highest power consumption and the strongest performance among the products of the same generation. The A14 adopts the same “2 big + 4 small” architecture as the previous generation, but the large core is unprecedentedly pulled to 3GHz The peak frequency is 13% higher than that of the previous generation A13. After all, the power consumption is high when the load is high, but the corresponding performance is nothing to say, and the power consumption is the lowest when the daily load is low. As for the poor heat dissipation, it is also Apple’s tradition, and the high temperature frequency reduction is also quite serious, and it is not entirely a problem of the chip technology.
The problem with Kirin 9000’s power overturn is that the GPU stacks too much. In the past, the flagship SoC of the Kirin series has always been relatively weak in terms of GPU. Although it has caught up a lot in recent years, it is still a little worse than the same generation of Qualcomm, and it is even worse than the A series. So this time, the Kirin 9000 had a painful experience and built a 24-core GPU at one time. Although it defeated the same-generation Qualcomm for the first time, it was still no better than the A14, and its power consumption was higher than that of the A14. Therefore, the power consumption of the 5nm Kirin is overturned by the GPU, and the CPU is still at a normal level.
Both Apple and Huawei use their own processors, and the Snapdragon 888, as the first commercial 5nm mobile processor to be launched, is complained by digital bloggers because the overall power consumption has been greatly improved compared with the previous generation chips, and there will be a drop in large applications when running large-scale applications. frequency, resulting in poor user experience. In addition to its expensive procurement costs, the average price of a Snapdragon 888 mobile phone exceeds RMB 3,000.
The 5nm process provides more transistors per unit area of the processor, which logically can bring higher performance and lower power consumption. According to the measured data exposed on the Internet, compared with the previous generation Snapdragon 865 using TSMC’s 7nm process, the Snapdragon 888 has indeed improved its single-core and multi-core computing performance by 10%, and its graphics performance has improved by 40%. LPDDR5 is improved. But the price is that the power consumption is significantly improved. The power consumption of single-core or multi-core is 32-43% higher than that of the previous generation Snapdragon 865, and the frequency will also be reduced when running large-scale mobile games. After about 10 minutes, the performance will drop to Comparable to the previous generation Snapdragon 865.
Power consumption test conducted by a well-known technology UP master
Regarding the power consumption of some 5nm processors, the analysis believes that there are two reasons: one is that Samsung’s 5nm process technology is not mature enough, and it is even compared with TSMC’s 7nm used by Snapdragon 865; the other is the latest A78 architecture and X1 Big cores are not “tamed” well.
Will 6nm be better?
MediaTek’s new products use 6nm. At present, the only mobile phone processor manufacturers using this process are Zhanrui. Although not on 5nm has been criticized for being “left behind” in the process of competition, but according to Taiwan’s “Business Times” report, thanks to OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi and other mainland mobile phone manufacturers chasing orders, MediaTek is expected to launch in the first half of 2021. The volume of goods will reach 80-90 million sets, which is about 1.6 to 1.8 times of the annual shipment in 2020.
At the same time, MediaTek is also expanding its 7nm wafer production to TSMC in the first quarter of this year. Coupled with the mass production of the 6nm flagship 5G chip Dimensity 1200, the company’s TSMC 7nm and 6nm wafer production volume will reach 110,000 in the first quarter. Qualcomm became TSMC’s third largest customer.
It can be seen that although 5nm products have been questioned by “difficulty in labor”, the real money and silver in hand is the last word.
In addition, in view of the above-mentioned 5nm chip rollover, everyone has a wait-and-see attitude towards the first-generation products of the new process, and instead pays attention to the more mature 6nm process. The same is the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process, but it is expected to have better performance in terms of stability and power consumption control. Although it has not been released yet, there are also some specific parameters of the MediaTek chip circulating on the Internet. On January 12, Weibo blogger @Digital Chat Station said that the 6nm MediaTek chip will be a 1+3+4 architecture – 1*3.0GHz A78+3*2.6GHz A78+4*2.0GHz A55, the GPU part is Dimensity 1000+ the same Mali G77MC9. According to the exposure news, compared with the Dimensity 1000+, the CPU performance is improved by 22%, the GPU performance is improved by 13%, it supports dual SA 5G networking, and the new ISP supports up to 200MP pixels.
From the data alone, the overall performance of this 6nm chip is comparable to that of Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, and the cost is expected to be lower. It will replace Dimensity 1000+, Snapdragon 865 and other chips and become the main chip in the domestic mid-range mobile phone market. As for whether to choose a 7nm, 6nm or 5nm processor for the new Honor’s first V40, we can only get a glimpse of the clues before the launch. Maybe the already independent Honor “doesn’t make a choice, want all of them”?
The Links: PM600HSA120 LQ200T3LZ18
