TRENDING
Duopoly
IDTechEx sees the mobile chipset landscape as highly concentrated with there being the duopoly of Qualcomm ( an American company ) and MediaTek ( a Taiwanese company ), who provide System-on-Chips ( SoCs ) to many mobile device manufacturers , as well as Apple and Google , who design their own chipsets for their devices . The report pitches Samsung and Oppo as chipset designers of particular note in relation to market consolidation .
In previous generations of the Samsung Galaxy smartphone , Samsung had employed the Samsung Exynos , a SoC designed by System LSI , a subdivision of Samsung .
Conversely , the report says , Samsung ’ s smartphone business is managed by the Mobile experience ( MX ) division .
The Elec reported in December 2022 that an application processor development team had been set up within the MX division , which could possibly usurp the role that System LSI have so far played in providing chipsets for Galaxy smartphones .
This came on the heels of reports that Samsung would be discontinuing the Exynos line of chipsets , a claim that – while appearing to be premature – was lent credence when , in February 2023 , the latest Galaxy smartphone , the S23 , was unveiled .
This flagship smartphone incorporates a Qualcomm SnapDragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset ( a custom piece of silicon for the Galaxy phones ), dispensing with Exynos chips for the first time .
For the time being , the report says , Qualcomm are providing chipsets for Samsung flagship smartphones , with the future of Exynos and proprietary Samsung mobile chipsets unclear .
Not all of these 1.2 billion smartphones include chipsets that have AI coprocessing capabilities .
To get a sense of the proportion of these chipsets that incorporate AI coprocessing , the report considers the best-selling models and how their volume of sales contributes to the total annual sales figure .
The ten bestselling smartphone models of 2022 ( most of which are Apple smartphones , the rest Samsung ) account for approximately 20 % of global sales . chips ). Of the Samsung smartphones , neither of the bestselling models has a dedicated AI acceleration component to their chipsets . As such , out of this 20 % of global sales , smartphones with AI coprocessing account for approximately 17 %, and smartphones without AI coprocessing account for 3 %.
The report concedes that applying these proportions to the total of 1.2 billion smartphones for 2022 would be erroneous , as several other factors need to be considered .
Of the Apple smartphones , the oldest chip present in these models is the A14 Bionic , which has a neural engine ( as do all subsequent Apple smartphone
The first is that the smartphone market is in decline and 2022 saw smartphone vendors cull some of their less profitable models so as to create a smaller
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