The surging AI wave is poised to reshape the landscape of the semiconductor industry. As a core segment of the sector, chip design has become a critical battleground in global chip competition. The global chip design market is highly concentrated. According to TrendForce, the top ten global chip designers generated a combined revenue of approximately $249.8 billion in 2024, with the top five players accounting for over 90% of the total revenue. Currently, IC design giants such as Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are actively deploying their strategies across four key markets: smartphones, AI PCs, automobiles, and servers. Meanwhile, as AI drives up the demand for high-performance chips and market competition intensifies, there is a clear trend toward greater collaboration across the industry chain.

Smartphone Market: Significant Boost in AI Performance of Flagship Chips

AI and advanced manufacturing processes have become the key buzzwords in the smartphone market. Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two major mobile SoC manufacturers, are competing to release their latest flagship chips to meet market demands.

Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite focuses on performance, on-device AI, and gaming ecosystems. Built on the second-generation 3nm process (N3E), it features dual Oryon super-large cores clocking over 4.2 GHz, delivering a 35% increase in single-core performance to handle high-load tasks like game rendering and AI inference. It also includes six customized performance cores clocked at 3.5 GHz, offering a 40% improvement in energy efficiency for multitasking and background management.

To meet the demand for AI computing power, the Snapdragon 8 Elite integrates the 6th-generation AI engine (Hexagon NPU), delivering 73 TOPS (73 trillion operations per second), a 45% increase over its predecessor.

In terms of gaming, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is equipped with the Adreno 830 GPU, supporting hardware-accelerated ray tracing and global illumination, which boosts graphics rendering speed by 25%. Through Snapdragon Elite Gaming technology, it enables Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and game super-resolution.

In April this year, MediaTek officially launched the Dimensity 9400+, a flagship 5G intelligent agent AI mobile chip. Featuring generative AI and intelligent agent AI capabilities, it brings a new flagship smartphone experience with its high intelligence, high performance, high energy efficiency, and low power consumption.

The Dimensity 9400+ adopts a second-generation all-big-core architecture. Its 8-core CPU includes one Arm Cortex-X925 super-large core clocked at up to 3.73 GHz, three Cortex-X4 super-large cores, and four Cortex-A720 large cores.