2024 Smartphone SoC Market Review: A Spectacular Display of Technological Innovation and Market Competition

2024 Smartphone SoC Market Review: A Spectacular Display of Technological Innovation and Market CompetitionThe smartphone market rebounded strongly in 2024, experiencing overall share growth for three consecutive quarters, leading to a flourishing SoC market. China witnessed remarkable changes this year, particularly the return of Huawei's Kirin chips, injecting a powerful boost into the domestic chip industry

2024 Smartphone SoC Market Review: A Spectacular Display of Technological Innovation and Market Competition

The smartphone market rebounded strongly in 2024, experiencing overall share growth for three consecutive quarters, leading to a flourishing SoC market. China witnessed remarkable changes this year, particularly the return of Huawei's Kirin chips, injecting a powerful boost into the domestic chip industry. Within a year, Huawei launched three flagship chips Kirin 9000S, Kirin 9010, and Kirin 9020 each showcasing significant advancements and achieving full self-research of major IPs, garnering widespread industry attention and praise. Despite lagging behind international giants in absolute performance due to factors such as process technology, Huawei, leveraging the deep synergy between Kirin and HarmonyOS, elevated the everyday user experience to a level comparable to, and in some cases surpassing, international competitors, surprising consumers globally.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two giants, demonstrated strong competitiveness, engaging in fierce competition in the pursuit of all-large-core architectures. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3+ and Dimensity 9400, with their aggressive upgrade strategies, significantly led in various performance benchmarks, even surpassing the Apple A18 Pro, securing a comprehensive victory for the Android camp. However, Apple seemed to have slowed its innovation pace in the SoC field. While the A18 Pro maintained a certain performance advantage, it failed to deliver sufficient surprises in terms of innovation and user experience enhancement. This raises the question: has Apple shown signs of fatigue in the smartphone SoC competition? Has the former leader become powerless? Or is it secretly accumulating strength, preparing for a stunning comeback in the future?

The 2024 smartphone SoC market was a captivating display of rapid technological progress and intense market competition. From Huawei's resurgence to the fierce battle between Qualcomm and MediaTek, and Apple's apparent lack of innovation, every detail warrants in-depth discussion and analysis. Below, through "Kuai Technology's 2024 Annual Awards: Smartphone SoC Edition," we review the highlights of the year in the smartphone SoC field, paying tribute to these chips that, while perhaps not perfect, deserve to be remembered.

Best Performance Award: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3+

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3+ is undoubtedly the king of overall smartphone SoC experience in 2024. Qualcomm poured significant effort into its development, even readjusting its naming conventions to highlight the massive performance improvements. This chip achieved several Qualcomm firsts: first to use a 3nm process; first to adopt an all-large-core architecture; first to use the self-developed Oryon CPU architecture; first to use a tiled GPU; first to support Unreal Engine 5 Nanite; and first to achieve a fully on-device AI assistant.

The CPU improvement is particularly noteworthy. Its second-generation Oryon CPU architecture, similar to MediaTek's, uses an all-large-core design. Two super-large cores based on the Oryon architecture reach a clock speed of 4.32GHz, delivering powerful performance while maintaining excellent energy efficiency. Qualcomm's official data shows a 50% performance increase and a 45% energy efficiency improvement compared to the previous generation. Furthermore, steady improvements were achieved in GPU, AI, 5G, and ISP. With the Snapdragon X80 modem and FastConnect 7900, its connectivity performance is world-leading. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3+ effectively manages power consumption and heat generation while offering aggressive upgrades, resulting in an exceptional overall experience, truly deserving the name "Gen 3+".

Best Performance Award: MediaTek Dimensity 9400

The Dimensity 9400 employs a second-generation all-large-core architecture, continuing the well-received design philosophy of its predecessor and building upon it with steady upgrades. In the high-end SoC market, the Dimensity 9400 has reached the same starting line as Qualcomm and is even sought after by flagship phone manufacturers for premieres.

Unlike Qualcomm's aggressive strategy, MediaTek adopted a more conservative approach. The Dimensity 9400, co-developed with Arm, utilizes the Cortex-X925 super-large core. Due to a significant performance leap, the traditional X5 naming convention was retained, mirroring the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3+. Leveraging the upgrade of the new generation NPU 890, the Dimensity 9400 topped the Zurich AI performance rankings. In the current era of widespread AI development across systems, the Dimensity 9400's AI performance is not just about benchmark scores but holds practical application value. For example, OPPO utilizes it to create features like AI Super Resolution, AI Noise Reduction, and AI Reflection Removal.

The 12-core Immortalis-G925 GPU has undergone even greater upgrades, becoming the current king in the mobile GPU field and pioneering a new generation of ray tracing technology, OMM, on mobile devices, comparable to PC-level ray tracing. This has completely revolutionized the mobile visual experience. Whether in benchmark scores or actual game testing, the Dimensity 9400's experience surpasses the A18 Pro and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3+. With two consecutive generations of ultra-large-core architectures, the Dimensity 9400 balances performance and energy efficiency without reckless aggression, showcasing its peak performance in the high-end SoC market and holding its own against Qualcomm even with the same process technology. It's foreseeable that more and more high-end flagship phones will be equipped with the Dimensity series, and its reputation will continue to improve. Its future prospects are bright.

Most Watched Award: Huawei Kirin 9020

The Kirin 9020 undeniably wins the "Most Watched Award." The fact that a domestically produced chip can compete with international giants in terms of daily user experience, even surpassing them in certain aspects, is proof enough of its value. Due to specific circumstances, our understanding of the Kirin 9020 is not entirely comprehensive, but overall, it represents a further optimization and improvement on the Kirin 9010, with noticeable progress in process technology and significant performance enhancements.

Of course, in terms of absolute performance, the Kirin 9020 still lags behind international giants, but the difference in daily user experience is almost negligible. Paired with the HarmonyOS system, its smoothness surpasses that of ordinary Snapdragon or Dimensity flagships. Kirin's unique hyper-threading technology improves CPU efficiency, even with a CPU process technology that falls behind international giants, and leads to better performance when the frequency is increased.

It is worth mentioning that Huawei's Taishan small core is a significant strategic move. Unlike Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple's relentless pursuit of all-large-core architectures, Kirin, out of necessity, self-developed a small core better suited to its own needs. Considering Huawei's large number of IoT products, this small core can be applied to more products in the future, making the development of a suitable small core more cost-effective. The Kirin 9020 achieved full self-research of its major IPs for the first time, with self-developed large, medium, and small CPU cores and GPU cores. This is a milestone achievement for Huawei and the entire domestic chip industry. Coupled with the pure-blood HarmonyOS system, it achieved full-chain self-research of hardware and software, reaching the peak level of domestic chips. We look forward to further breakthroughs from Kirin in the future, narrowing the gap with international giants.

Most Watched Award: Apple A18 Pro

Apple has opted for incremental improvements for several years. The A18 Pro's upgrade this year is particularly limited, significantly lagging behind Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Kirin, hence its ineligibility for the "Best Performance Award. However, objectively, the A18 Pro remains a powerful SoC, firmly in the top tier. Through process improvements, its energy efficiency and heat generation have significantly improved, addressing the fatal flaws of the A17 Pro and noticeably enhancing the actual user experience of the iPhone Pro series.

A 16-core neural engine delivers 35 TOPS of computing power, better supporting the AI features of the iPhone 16 Pro series. Overall, the A18 Pro's overall performance has improved by about 20% compared to the previous generation, but the energy efficiency upgrade has actually reduced power consumption, improving iPhone battery life and heat dissipation. The reduction in heat generation is a tangible improvement for users. However, we still expect Apple to demonstrate stronger commitment next year; otherwise, it may struggle to keep pace with technological advancements.

Technological Innovation Award: MediaTek Dimensity 9300+

The sudden emergence of the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 series revolutionarily premiered the all-large-core CPU architecture. Initially met with skepticism due to concerns about energy efficiency, it ultimately became a highly sought-after product. While significantly improving performance, it demonstrated better energy efficiency than the traditional large-medium-small core combination, giving rise to several best-selling models and soaring positive reviews.

Although traditionally associated with higher energy consumption, all-large-core CPUs are also more efficient. For example, while consuming 50% more power than a small core for the same task, a large core can complete it in