Rumor: OPPO is developing a flagship mobile phone chip
Among Android smartphone manufacturers, Samsung is considered the leader. With a complete supply chain and various chip development and manufacturing departments, Samsung can equip its Galaxy series with the best screen, memory, storage chips, and other spare parts. As the SoC of smartphones, the performance of the Samsung Exynos series is not bad. In recent years, more and more smartphone manufacturers have realized the importance of being equipped with self-developed chips, and have begun to start with various types of chips and design customized chips that suit them.
Google’s just-released Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro abandon the Qualcomm solution they have been using and adopt the self-developed Tensor SoC. This SoC uses a triple-cluster design in the CPU part, which includes two Cortex-X1 super-large cores, is equipped with Mali G78 GPU, and is equipped with a TPU for AI computing, and integrates a Titan M security chip. It uses Samsung 5nm process manufacturing.
According to Nikkei Asia, OPPO, the world’s fourth-largest smartphone manufacturer, is following Google’s footsteps, developing customized SoCs for its products, and plans to be installed on flagship Android smartphones launched in 2023 or 2024. With the volume of OPPO’s annual sales, the resources needed to support the development of custom chips are not a big problem. It is understood that OPPO has been making steady investments in its chip projects, and even hired developers with industry experiences such as Qualcomm, Huawei, and MediaTek. In addition, OPPO is seeking TSMC’s (TSMC) 3nm process capacity to produce this SoC, following Apple and Intel.
According to market data, Qualcomm’s recent performance has not been good, and its share of the global smartphone SoC market has declined. If OPPO, a long-term customer of the Snapdragon series, also turns to self-developed chips, it will further weaken Qualcomm’s market performance. At the same time, OPPO shares the supply chain with OnePlus, vivo, and Realme, and its actions will have a certain impact on Qualcomm and even Samsung.
