"This morning, Huawei Hisilicon Unicorn 950 was officially released. The specific performance is described in detail later in the article. This article also takes this opportunity to review the development process of Hisilicon unicorn and how to refine today's Unicorn 950? Interested friends can discuss it together.
Hisilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei and ranks first among domestic IC design companies in terms of operating revenue. The company was founded in October 2004, formerly known as Huawei integrated circuit design center.
Hisilicon semiconductor has a wide range of business, including fixed and wireless networks, network access terminals and wireless terminals. It is widely used in Huawei's optical communication products and data communication products, including router chips, set-top box chips, mobile phone lithography chips, video monitoring chips, switch chips and photonic chips. In the field of video surveillance chips, Hisilicon is almost in a dominant position in China.
Because the protagonist of this article is Haisi Qilin. Therefore, other chips automatically filter, and only talk about the most well-known Hisilicon mobile phone chip - Kirin.
Kirin's development route choice
At the recent 2015 China Computer Conference, Li Guojie, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, gradually formed three routes for the development of domestic CPUs:
Independently design the route and independently build the basic software and hardware system. Represented by Godson and Shenwei;
Arm technical route, purchase arm instruction authorization or hard core and soft core authorization. Represented by Hisilicon and Spreadtrum;
ODM route, joint venture or cooperation with foreign countries, entrusted foreign design, and obtained some product property rights. Represented by megacore and macrocore.
So why did Huawei Hisilicon choose the arm route? This starts with the reason and purpose of Huawei Hisilicon's development of mobile phone chips.
Reasons and purposes for Huawei's development of mobile phone chips:
On the one hand, Texas Instruments, the original partner, may gradually fade out of the mobile phone chip market - driven out by Qualcomm by means of communication patents and buying baseband to send SOC;
On the other hand, it is also to improve the self-sufficiency of core parts, which is imitated and overcharged by suppliers.
If we choose the independent route, it will be difficult for marketization to go to the sky, and it will be difficult to get blood back from the market. Therefore, it is natural to choose the development route of purchasing arm's IP core to integrate SOC - Purchasing ready-made IP core (ARM), GPU core (GC, Mali) and various interface IP cores (Synopsys), and integrating SOC through a certain process.
Although the choice of ARM technology route is a bit more mercenary commercialization, a bit less ideal and belief to solve the problem that industrial development and information security are controlled by others, and will also be subject to arm and Google. However, adhering to the AA system greatly reduces the capital cost, time cost and technical threshold of R & D, which is very conducive to the realization of market-oriented operation.
Tragic K3
Qilin's growth is also a journey of forging ahead in setbacks and growing up in bumps.
From 2009 to 2010, Hisilicon developed and promoted the first mobile phone SOC - hi3611 (K3), which integrates dual core arm-11 and has been used in smart phones and other smart devices.
Although Huawei has high hopes for K3, the ideal is full and the reality is skinny - K3 can't even have a foothold in the Shanzhai machine market in the end.
Why? On the one hand, K3 has its own reasons. But more because of the lack of strong partners and market positioning and marketing problems.
Because the mobile phone chip market is basically occupied by manufacturers such as Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Meiman electronics and MediaTek, K3 can only compete for the most low-end Shanzhai machine market, while Shanzhai machine manufacturers have limited technical strength and quality control can not be compared with large manufacturers. Many problems are actually caused by Shanzhai machine manufacturers themselves, but they are often attributed to the failure of K3 products in the end.
In addition, the development of everything has a spiral process, which must go through the process of finding problems - analyzing problems - solving problems. For example, MediaTek, which entered the mobile phone chip market in 2004, once used the mobile phone solution company subordinate to TCL to solve the bug and improve the chip.
Similarly, K3 is certainly no exception. Because of the poor technical strength of Shanzhai machine manufacturers, they can not feed back the existing problems in use, and then jointly improve the chip. On the contrary, K3's reputation has been tarnished because of the huge shipment.
Finally, the marketing practice is also very debatable. In the case of immature products, instead of developing one or two powerful big customers, they chose to develop more than ten small customers and distribute goods in large quantities, resulting in great difficulties in management and eventually leading to a large backlog of channel dealers
Therefore, the fate of K3 must be a tragedy, but this is far from the end of the Kirin chip tragedy.
K3v2 of Keng father
In January 2012, Hisilicon released k3v2. The SOC integrated quad core arm A9 and chose gc4000 of the graphic core on the GPU. Because it could not compete with TSMC's latest 28nm process, it had to go back and choose 40nm process, which laid the groundwork for k3v2's Keng father.
In terms of AP, Hisilicon's design experience in 2012 has no advantages over domestic "walled factories" such as Quanzhi and Ruixin micro, not to mention that compared with international major manufacturers such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, as the first released quad core A9 SOC, Hisilicon is obviously unable to achieve the "high-end" position of its products.
In terms of GPU, choosing gc4000 is another failure. Although gc4000 has better theoretical performance / chip area ratio, small chip area and relatively lower natural cost, the performance of GPU depends on frequency improvement.
Because the 40nm process is selected, it directly leads to high power consumption. A number of Huawei medium and high-end mobile phones equipped with k3v2 are also jokingly called "warm hand treasure". In order to control the power consumption, Hisilicon has to reduce the gc4000 whose original frequency should be 600MHz to 480mhz. In some applications, the GPU frequency is even locked to the maximum 240mhz.
As mentioned earlier, in order to control power consumption, Hisilicon has kept the GPU frequency very low, which has a consequence that the game experience of k3v2 is not satisfactory - many big games have frequent compatibility problems, some can't be played on the black screen, and some have mapping errors; Even small games have the problem of insufficient fluency.
Therefore, high fever, poor game experience and small problems have become synonymous with k3v2. In order to support Kirin chip, Huawei suppressed the opposition of Huawei terminal company and insisted on using k3v2 on its medium and high-end models for two years. Specifically, from 2012 to 2014, P2, D2, mate1, P6, glory 2, glory 3 and other mobile phones successively entered the pit.
(Huawei's self mockery of k3v2)
Realistically speaking, k3v2 is a big pit, which really pits Huawei as its father - because it has completely lost to Xiaolong 600 and other SOC carried by Xiaomi mobile phone in terms of performance, power consumption, compatibility and stability, which has greatly affected the sales of Huawei's medium and high-end models. Many pollen turned black by the powder in k3v2 pit. I saw that Huawei mobile phone equipped with Hisilicon chip had its own avoidance aura.
Some people say that Kirin chips do not take out for differentiated competition. Of course, there are reasons in this regard, but if you want to take out, someone has to buy it. In that year, k3v2 was uncompetitive in the market.
It can be said that if Huawei had not coordinated among its subsidiaries in a way full of planned economy characteristics, not adopted the vertical integration mode to provide all-round support to Hisilicon in terms of capital, carrying platform and sales channels, and operated in full accordance with the market economy, Kirin would have died in the torrent of market competition after two failures of K3 and k3v2.
Kirin 910, 92x, 93x on track
As the saying goes, a fall makes a gain. After two consecutive defeats, Hisilicon has accumulated experience and learned lessons. In 2014, Hisilicon made magic changes to k3v2 by upgrading the 40nm process to 28nm and replacing the gc4000 with mali450mp4, which solved the compatibility and power consumption problems in one fell swoop and built the first functional SOC of Hisilicon - Kirin 910.
In May 2014, Kirin 920, an easy-to-use SOC, was released. The AP part of the SOC is composed of quad core A7, quad core A15 and mali628mp4. It has done a good balance in performance and power consumption. The compatibility has also been improved due to the use of Mali's GPU, correcting everyone's impression of high power consumption, poor compatibility and many small problems of Hisilicon chip.
The highlight of Kirin 92x series chips is not CPU and GPU, because these are to buy foreign technologies and products. The real highlight is the communication module (Baseband) independently developed by Huawei. Huawei has a deep foundation in communication technology. The 920 tyrant 720 baseband supports five systems TD-LTE / LTE FDD / TD-SCDMA / WCDMA / GSM (that is, 2G / 3G / 4G and telecom 4G of China Mobile and China Unicom). It is the world's first commercial LTE CAT6 chip scheme.
How important is baseband? The ability of mobile phones to make calls, send text messages and surf the Internet largely depends on the role of baseband. Texas Instruments, once the overlord, had to launch the mobile phone chip market because of baseband. Giants such as Intel and NVIDIA are struggling in the mobile phone chip market because of baseband technology and software ecology.
The AP of Kirin 93x series chips integrates 8-core A53 and mali628mp4, which is limited in performance improvement and balanced in performance and power consumption. According to the actual measurement of enthusiasts, the power consumption of single-core A53 is about 500MW. The highlight of 93x series chips is also baseband, which alleviates the problems of signal instability or signal difference in high-speed mobile scenes and basement scenes.
Kirin 950 with leap forward progress
On November 5, Huawei Hisilicon released the Kirin 950, which integrates the 4-core arm cortex A53 and the 4-core arm cortex A72. The official said, "A72 improves the performance by 11% compared with a57 and reduces the power consumption by 20%."
In terms of GPU, malit88mp4 is used, which is officially declared to be "100% higher than the graphics generation capacity of the previous generation GPU and 100% higher than gflops". Although there is no direct comparison of 1vs1, according to the data of arm, the performance of Mali t760mp8 is likely to be stronger than that of Mali t880mp4. The GPU of the Kirin 950 may not be better than the exynos 7420 released by Samsung last year - Huawei adheres to the concept of "enough is good" and is always "stingy" on the GPU.
Among the running points displayed on the spot, the Kirin 950 running point of anrabbit v5.6.2 is as high as 82220. As a comparison, Samsung's exynos 7420 is divided into 70000 +, considering the comparison between exynos 7420 and Kirin 950 in terms of GPU. Therefore, the performance of A72 is improved to a certain extent compared with a57（ This running point is carried out on the bare development board, which is different from the running point on the mobile phone.)
In terms of process technology, it takes the lead in adopting the industry-leading TSMC 16nm FF + process, which is the first commercial SOC chip of 16nm FF + process. It is distinguished from the 16nm FF + process used by Apple's TSMC A9, because A9 adopts the plug-in Qualcomm baseband. Strictly speaking, it can only be regarded as AP rather than SOC.
Compared with 28nm HPM, officials claim that "performance is improved by 40% and power consumption is saved by 60%.
Although it is still impossible to prove the official propaganda by physical test, after referring to the 14nm manufacturing process of a57 of exynos 7420, the power consumption does not have the fever like Xiaolong 810, and Hisilicon Qilin has a good performance in power consumption control - Qilin 910, Qilin 920 and Qilin 930 have a good balance between power consumption and performance. Kirin 950 with 16nm FF + process should not become a "fever" SOC.
In terms of coprocessor, the i5 coprocessor of Kirin 950 can liberate the main processor and improve the battery life of the mobile phone.
In terms of photography, the Kirin 950 resets the camera system, supports 14bit dual ISPs, and improves the throughput performance by 4 times, up to 960 pixel / S; Support hybrid focusing technology, and adaptively select the best focusing mode according to the shooting scene; In addition, there are more filter effects to experience interesting photos.
In terms of RF chip, Kirin 950 adopts a new self-developed RF chip, which not only has higher integration, but also has lower power consumption. It supports a wider frequency band range (450mhz-3.5ghz), so that the mobile phone can support a wider range of global roaming.
In addition, the Kirin 950 also adopts new lpddr4 and new system bus, with stronger hardware performance. Kirin 950 also specially optimizes the chip boost performance and the continuous performance of the chip system to ensure that the user can respond within 100 milliseconds when triggering the operation; Under normal working state, ensure that each frame drawing is completed in 1 / 60 second.
epilogue
Indeed, Hisilicon's development model attached to the AA system cannot build an independent technology system belonging to China, which has limited significance for realizing the independent control of basic software and hardware, nor can it solve the dilemma that China's integrated circuit industry is controlled by others and national information security is controlled by others. However, commercial success has indeed recaptured some markets from international giants such as Qualcomm, and the independent innovation in baseband technology is worthy of our respect.
Hisilicon's success stems from Huawei's investment in Hisilicon regardless of cost, from the technical system created by arm and Google, from Huawei's vertical integration model and the hard work of Huawei employees.
It is understood that China Mobile will use volte commercially in the whole network by the end of 2015, and Kirin 920 / 930 / 950 full series chips support volte. Insiders pointed out that this will bring users a new generation of high-definition voice experience, greatly shorten the call connection delay, improve the video call quality by 10 times compared with 3G, and meet the needs of users to call and surf the Internet at the same time.
Wish Kirin good luck when the 950 is about to be launched.
Related reading:
Huawei Kirin 950 runs more than 80000 coprocessor i7 to i5, and the baseband supports Cat 6
Abuse a single dog! The Goddess / female ticket's favorite gifts are here. Take them without thanks!
What Qualcomm can't do, Huawei has achieved the new Balong chip
"Core" war opens, Huawei Kirin 950 processor will be released
The nexus 6p with snapdragon 810 chip has no heating problem“
Our other product:
