The surging wave of AI is poised to reshape the landscape of the semiconductor industry. As a core segment of this sector, chip design has emerged as a critical battleground in global competition. The global chip design market is highly concentrated. According to data from TrendForce, the combined revenue of the top ten global chip designers reached approximately $249.8 billion in 2024, with the top five companies accounting for over 90% of that total. Currently, IC design giants such as NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are actively expanding their presence across four key markets: smartphones, AI PCs, automobiles, and servers. Meanwhile, driven by rising demand for high-performance chips fueled by AI and intensifying market competition, there is a clear trend toward greater collaboration and synergy across the industry chain.

Smartphone Market: Flagship Chips See Significant AI Performance Boost

AI and advanced manufacturing processes have become the defining keywords in the smartphone market. Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two major mobile SoC manufacturers, are racing to launch their latest flagship chips to meet evolving market demands.

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

To meet the growing demand for AI computing power, the Snapdragon 8 Elite integrates the sixth-generation AI engine (Hexagon NPU), achieving a computing capacity of 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-level ray tracing and global illumination, which boosts graphics rendering speed by 25%. Through the Snapdragon Elite Gaming technology, it enables Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and game super-resolution techniques.

In April this year, MediaTek officially launched the Dimensity 9400+, a flagship 5G intelligent agent AI mobile chip. Delivering generative AI and intelligent agent AI capabilities, it offers a new flagship smartphone experience characterized by 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 comprises 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.