Why Every Smartphone OEM Want to Use Homemade GPU?

By SemiWiki

August 21, 2013

          Smartphone shipment explosion and continuous growth is attracting always more OEM and chip makers, this is not really surprising, as the wireless market can be identified as the faster growing, and larger electronic segment ever seen. On such a mass market, the real question is “how to differentiate?” Apple is unique; just trying to mimic an iPhone is certainly not the best way to success. Samsung benefit from an incredible vertical industrial power, starting from SC design and manufacturing (Nand Flash, Application Processor and more) and going up to the development of several dozen of new smartphone models –every year. We have seen that smartphone marketing is way different from the “old” PC marketing: communicating on the CPU MIPS power is not anymore the killer argument, neither the memory amount, OEM have to be creative, and try to hit customer expectations. Power consumption is certainly an important feature, but probably not very sexy as a sale argument, and certainly not immediately visible. What could be immediately seen by a potential customer when looking at various smartphones? Is it the device shape or the design? Yes, but in Semiwiki we talk about semiconductors, barely about design… The image lighting on the screen, and the associated semiconductor function, the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), is certainly one of the key features immediately seen by the future buyer.

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