News & Reviews:   chipset

The rise of mobile gaming means that GPU performance in a smartphone is something people pay more attention to these days. Despite that, there hasn't been an app that outright allows the user to control a mobile GPU so far. That's about to change, thanks to a Xiaomi and Qualcomm.

Based on a statement by sammobile.com, it seems that Samsung will be manufacturing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 875G and Snapdragon 735G chipsets using their 5nm EUV manufacturing process. With that said, our source mentioned that the transistors on the 5nm process are about 25% smaller compared to 7nm which allows manufacturers to pack more transistors on the chip.

The flagships from Samsung with Exynos chipset series have always caught in comparison with the variants that come with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset series. Sadly, the ones with Exynos chipsets were always defeated in the battles due to weaker performance. By being determined to win for once, the Korean tech giant has raised the efforts into research and development for a new K-Chip series.

The Dimensity 1000+ is currently the most powerful chipset that MediaTek can offer. Earlier, the iQOO Z1 has become the first device to utilize the chipset, and we're anticipating more devices to be launched equipping the powerhouse after that. Now, it is rumoured that a new Redmi phone with the chipset will be launched soon and it could be the Redmi K40.

At the beginning of the year, we saw the news that OPPO will be manufacturing chipsets to be used on their own devices. The process of making a chipset takes a long time and great effort, so it might have to be a while before OPPO's chipset gets to meet the world. However, it is said that the company is now speeding up the process because of the US sanctions that happened between the US and Huawei.

Most devices these days use chipsets featuring CPU and GPU cores from ARM, with new hardware announced once a year. Well, that time of the year has come and the company has now announced the Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1 CPU cores, as well as Mali-G78 GPU that will greatly boost the performance of future smartphones.

Earlier, we have heard the news that HONOR might turn to MediaTek for the supply of chipsets as the aftermath of the US sanctions. As the parent brand, Huawei is also in a hardship that the tech giant has been cut from most of its chipset suppliers. Huawei has been using MediaTek's chipsets on some of its smartphones, and the order made to the Taiwanese chip manufacturer has even increased to 300 percent this year. However, it is said that MediaTek might not able to continue to supply chipsets to Huawei for some reason.

The US sanctions on Huawei has been happening for quite a while and the situation is definitely not getting better anytime soon. Earlier, we have also seen the news that the President of United States Donald Trump has extended the ban until May 2021. Not only the company has lost access to Google services, there are also some other problems surfacing as well such as chip supply. It is said that HONOR (sub-brand from Huawei) is planning to turn to MediaTek for the supply of 5G SoCs in the future.

Not only the competition between smartphones is intense nowadays, the manufacturers that provide chipsets for the devices are also required to keep up with the needs of the market. Today, MediaTek has launched an upgraded version of the Dimensity 1000 chipset and it's called Dimensity 1000 Plus (just like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 and 855 Plus), and there are a lot of improvements making it strong enough to compete with the others.

There were reports spotted on mydrivers.com, stating that Qualcomm might be thinking of putting a limit on how cheap a smartphone equipped with the Snapdragon 865 with 5G can be priced at. While not much has been confirmed, it seems that the lowest a smartphone with the chipset can be priced at is around USD430(~RM1788).