Chinese smartphone maker, Oppo, is reportedly working on introducing its mobile application processors soon. A Chinese publication citing an official statement from an Oppo executive claims that component will be used in its in-house mobile APUs and could be called the Oppo M1 chipset.

Oppo has also trademarked the processor at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) certification website. The company has hired some previous engineers of MediaTek and Spreadtrum to work on the chipset. Tony Chen, Oppo founder, and CEO has also highlighted that the company would spend around CNY 50 billion into R&D. One of the biggest impacts of Oppo introducing its processors will be a threat in the demand of Qualcomm-based chipsets as well as Samsung made Exynos SoCs.

It will be interesting to see how Oppo will cut its reliance on Qualcomm. Given the company’s long-time partnership with the leading processor chip marker.

In 2019, TSMC was the only pure-play foundry manufacturing ICs using 7nm process technology. Not coincidentally, its overall revenue per wafer increased significantly as leading fabless IC suppliers lined up to have their newest designs manufactured on the 7nm process. TSMC was the only pure-play foundry that enjoyed higher revenue-per-wafer in 2019 (13%) compared to 2014. In contrast, 2019 revenue per wafer figures at GlobalFoundries, UMC, and SMIC—whose smallest process node is 12/14nm—were down by 2%, 14%, and 19% respectively, compared with 2014.

It is 2 players on the market already - TSMC and Samsung. Intel has around 20-25% last chance with their 7nm process, but they'll need to sell a lot of their empire for this.

Nvidia expanses increased

And it is bad sign, as they need more and more people to do each new generation of GPUs.

AMD Finances

Short summary - more marketing expenses, more profits for shareholders, much more expensive CPUs for consumers.

Power consumption and challenges associated with scaling limitations have cut into the transistor growth rates of some IC products during the last 10-15 years. DRAM transistor counts were increasing at the average rate of about 45% per year through the early 2000s but slowed to about 20% through the 16Gb generation that appeared in 2016. Samsung began volume production with single-chip 16Gb DRAM devices near the end of 2016. One year earlier Samsung initiated volume production of 12Gb DRAM chips, and 8Gb devices one year before that. The DDR5 standard still being finalized by JEDEC includes monolithic 24Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb devices.

Annual growth in flash memory densities remained at 55-60% per year through about 2012 but has since been around 30-35% per year. For conventional 2D planar NAND flash, the highest density on a single die available in January 2020 was 128Gb. The maximum density for a 3D NAND chip is currently 1.33Tb for a 96-layer quad-level-cell (QLC) device. QLC combined with new 96-layer technology should enable 3D NAND to reach 1.5Tb density in 2020 with 128-layer technology leading to 2Tb chips.

Transistor counts in Intel’s PC microprocessors grew approximately 40% per year through 2010, but the rate dropped to half that in the years following. Transistor count increases for the company’s server MPUs paused in the mid- to late-2000s but then started growing again at the rate of about 25% per year. Intel stopped revealing details of transistor counts in 2017.

Transistor counts for Apple’s A series application processors used in its iPhones and iPads have increased at the annual rate of 43% since 2013. That rate includes as the most recent endpoint the A13 processor, with its 8.5 billion transistors. In the first half of 2020, Apple is expected to unveil an iPad Pro based on a new A13X processor.

TSMC is set to kick off volume production of chips built using 5nm process technology in April, and has already seen the process capacity fully booked by clients, according to industry sources.

Lakefield chip

4x Atom (green) + 1x Core (dark area at bottom center) + GPU (right ~40%) + uncore (left ~30%)

Published reports that SMIC is preparing a 7-nanometer production process are incorrect. The error is understandable, however, as it is based on favorable comparisons SMIC has been making between its newest process technology (called N+1) and rivals’ 7nm processes.

Now more clear.

https://www.eetimes.com/smic-graduating-from-14nm-to-something-sort-of-akin-to-7nm/#

Remember Xiaomi’s first-ever self-developed processor, the Surge S1? The chip made headlines back in 2017 as it pushed the Chinese smartphone maker into the elite group of tech companies like Samsung and Huawei that could develop their own chipsets. However, after the Surge S1, we didn’t hear much about its chip development progress. The latest information from China suggests that Xiaomi has likely abandoned its chipset project.

Reason here can be ARM licensing issue, as it can be next move in trade war. So Xiaomi can secretly trying to use another architecture.

TSMC will likely revise its sales outlook this year despite its advanced technology leadership, according to market sources.

Surprise.

According to Kuo, Apple is indeed prepping ‘several’ new ARM-based MacBooks and Macs for a 2021 launch. Kuo expects that Apple will save between 40 to 60 percent on processor costs by switching to its custom ARM-based chips over Intel’s x86 designs. Also, as we argued, it will give Apple greater product differentiation of most of its PC-based competition.

Intel is almost done. It is not clear how it'll manage to make their 7nm running having 3 huge issues - new cheap and fast Ryzen mobile chips, lack of huge profits that Apple provided and unprecedented economic collapse going one.

Intel 10nm plans for 2020

3nm delayed by at least half a year

TSMC is said to face the same problems as reports recently reported on Samsung. Some items of equipment are currently difficult to access, and installation in the factories is being delayed accordingly. According to media reports, this should take place up to six months later, only in December this year the Fab 18 will be further equipped and trial production will begin. No chips from series production are to be expected at 3 nm before 2022.

5nm process is almost the same as existing 7nm (and TSMC failed with 7nm EUV this year).

3nm that must had been next (and most probably final) step can be delayed to 2022-2023.