China's Allwinner Outsold Intel, Qualcomm In Tablet Processors In 2012 121
An anonymous reader writes "ARM licensee Allwinner sold more application processors for tablet computers in 2012 than Intel and Qualcomm put together, according to this EE Times article that references market researcher Strategy Analytics. Overall one in five tablet processors was provided by a Chinese vendor in 2012, according to the article, partly because they sell chips at half the price of similarly specified chips from better known vendors."
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung is manufacturing those in Texas. Technically that is in the US although the residents there seem to think differently.
As of August 2012,[18] the A5 is manufactured at Samsung's Austin, Texas factory. Samsung invested $3.6 billion in a facility in Austin to produce chips such as processors, and nearly all of that wing's output is dedicated to Apple components.[19] Samsung has invested a further $4.2 billion at the Austin facility in order to transition to a 28 nm fabrication process by the second half of 2013
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
These are cheap for a reason, and they're unpopular in the rest of the world for a reason.
The Allwinner chips used in these tablets are all ARM Cortex-A8 based. A Cortex-A8 is basically unfit for a tablet. The lowest end tablets sold by Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Sony, Acer, and Asus 4 years ago didn't have a CPU this slow. Just because they can get away with selling these in China doesn't mean that they are worth anything.
Highly selective metrics (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is called dumping (Score:5, Informative)
The xbox division ran at a huge loss for many years before it ever turned a profit...
Re:This is called dumping (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, they are selling at or below cost to suck up market share.
no, they're not. they're a profit-maximising company, just like any other profit-maximising company. if they did what you're accusing them of doing, they'd go bankrupt.
what we believe they have done is just said, "right: we're going to aim BIG". rather than be scared shitless of the NREs for processor development, they simply decided that they would aim for an extremely large number of processors, and either got a PRC Govt Grant or just got very very good investors. they would then have negotiated an EXTREMELY good rate with one of the fabs, based on the projected volume, and that alone would allow them to sell at the price that they set out to sell at. especially if they placed a cash order for a vast number of chips.
so it's simple economics and sound business sense that has allowed them to sell a 1ghz processor at $7.50 when all *PREVIOUS* competition *INCLUDING COMPETITORS IN CHINA* were selling at around $11 or even $13 for a product that had less features.
the other thing that has allowed them to take the world by storm in this area is the extremely high level of integration in their SoC, as well as working with (i believe they actually own) X-Powers to create an exceptionally low-cost and highly optimised Power Management IC, called the AXP209. the cost of this PMIC is $1.50 in volume.
basically you can get away with $30 worth of parts to do a seriously good little board, which has 1gb of RAM, 4gb of NAND Flash, ethernet, SATA, USB2 and HDMI and more, when everyone else is struggling to hit $35 to $38. that's a big, big difference in this kind of market, and it explains why, when the Allwinner A10 was introduced, that a major recession occurred INSIDE CHINA, in the Electronics District of Guangdong, Shenzen.
i'll say that again, in case you didn't understand. whilst you are accusing China (the country) of "price dumping in the USA", *one very ambitious young company* managed to cause a MAJOR RECESSION IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
why is that? it's because the electronics industry in china is critically dependent on and focussed on volume sales. the Allwinner A10 and its associated PMIC and high level of integration left many factories holding out-of-date stock. companies that did NOT move over to the A10 in time were left with stock that they couldn't shift. if they did shift - reneging on contracts in the process, in many cases - they left the SUPPLIERS holding the stock, and i don't know if you're aware of this but China basically operates on a cash-only, cash-up-front basis.
the shift caused by the introduction of the A10 was so vast, and so quick, that it basically wiped out any company that didn't change over in time. including the ODM company that we were talking to at the time, whose clients (factories) all had invested in AMLogic's $13 processor at the time.
so - please do be better informed before making assumptions and accusations such as those which you are making, ok? the country you live in is a very small market compared to china. america is not even particularly relevant, here, because americans expects bigger, better and much much faster than a 1ghz single-core low-power ARM processor. please take more care, ok?
Re:So what? (Score:2, Informative)
Allwinters most popular chip at the moment is quad Cortex-A7.
Rockchip is another Chinese manufacturer making quad A8 (RK3188)
Both are faster than fastest Tegra3.
Re:Allwinner is a winner. (Score:5, Informative)
The GPU isn't the problem. It's the fact that Allwinner still hasn't created an Android OMX stack for their hwaccel video codecs.
People don't understand that the ARM SoC world is different than the desktop world - in the desktop world, EVERYTHING graphics-related is on the GPU, and it's all blobbed up.
In the ARM SoC world, the graphics subsystem is split up significantly, with a lot of mix-and-match opportunities.
For example, Mali 400MP GPUs are found in a wide variety of SoCs - Samsung Exynos4, Allwinner, Amlogic chips, Rockchip RK3066, some MediaTek chips, and I think a few others. People say, "when will there be hwaccel on Mali" - the answer is NEVER. This is because hwaccel video decoding is done by separate components in the SoC. In the case of Samsung Exynos, it's Samsung's MFC. In the case of Qualcomm, it's "vidc". In the case of Allwinner, it's CedarX. Amlogic's is just "amplayer" or something like that. FYI, at least the kernel interfaces (albeit not the firmware) for MFC and vidc are open-source, as are OMX stacks for both of those implementations.
You can also see other interesting pairings too - for example, Samsung's MFC engine is very similar between Exynos3 and Exynos4, despite Exynos3 having a PowerVR GPU, and Exynos4 having Mali 400MP.
Samsung's MFC has "good enough" OMX support to do XBMC on Exynos3, 4, and 5.
Allwinner simply has NO OMX decoding solution for Android using CedarX, only their special proprietary player.
Same for Amlogic's amplayer - the only reason XBMC works with Amlogic chips is because XBMC had "special" nonstandard playback support added.
The end result is a lot of people.
Re:This is called dumping (Score:0, Informative)
which is, 300+20*36 = $1,010 for a $700 phone.