Chip time after metaverse

Since the second half of last year, the concept of the Metaverse has become one of the biggest hot spots in the tech industry, and tech companies have said they will normally use the Metaverse. Now it's widely believed that AR/VR will be the key entry into the metaverse, making it an area where big companies have invested heavily. In the field of AR / VR hardware, Facebook's Quest series has become the world's most popular VR device, and Chinese companies such as ByteDance and Tencent have also recently invested heavily, at ByteDance has reached the highest level of market share in China. VR product makers Pico and Tencent also recently acquired Black Shark and are targeting VR hardware products. In partnership with AR hardware, Ray-Ban and Facebook have jointly developed the first Ray-Ban Story smart glasses for the public over the past half-century, and companies such as Huawei in China have also released a number of standards. Indeed, by 2023, AR hardware should also be in close development.

The performance of ARVR hardware is critical to the user experience it can support, and its chips have become an integral part of the hardware experience. Now, the main vendor in the ARVR market is undoubtedly Qualcomm, and its Snapdragon XR series has become the go-to for all VR devices. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon also mentioned Qualcomm Investment Day late last year. The ARVR (XR) market will be one of Qualcomm's most important predictors in the future, and tens of millions of affected chips are expected to ship by 2021. This year, Qualcomm and Microsoft announced their AR collaboration plans at CES 2022 In this plan, Microsoft and Qualcomm will jointly develop a custom Snapdragon chip for AR glasses, which will support the Microsoft Mesh platform, and Qualcomm Snapdragon ports will be supported in two key areas. Development of the AR platform.

Judging from the strength of last year to this year, the ARVR chip industry is booming, with Qualcomm almost monopolizing it now. However, as the market size grows, more and more chipmakers will enter the market.

ARVR Chip Limitations

ARVR chip limits determine the number of chip companies that can enter the market to compete. It's also a good idea to start with a review of the VR chip.

First, in terms of architecture, the architecture of the VR chip is very similar to the SoC of other smart devices, where the processor (AP) runs the operating system and controls the operation of the device. VR chips must therefore first have a powerful processor, but this time it is not impossible. Since the use and integration of ARM's high-performance IP processor has become the standard for most SoC manufacturers, we consider it the processor of VR chips. It's not an insurmountable start.

Among the many IP addresses of the VR SoC, the most important IP address that determines the user experience is the GPU in monitoring and display. Currently, the main application of VR devices is games, and almost all VR games are 3D images (because 3D images can provide users with the best experience). So GPU performance determines polygon count and polygon count. Rendering effects in 3D games. Now, the 3D graphics quality of VR games is almost the same as PC and console games 10 years ago, so the game quality will become more and more important due to the expansion and development of the game. 'ecosystem. This will drive demand for GPU rendering capabilities in VR chips. Unlike desktop GPUs, GPUs in VR chips need to consider their power efficiency rating as consumer VR devices are now battery powered. Therefore, the energy efficiency rating should determine the battery life of a VR device and ensure that: The VR device does not dissipate heat. Problems.

In addition to high-quality graphics, the big need for users to experience VR devices is resolution. VR devices must be 4K or higher The main problem for consumers of VR devices is now "screen window interference" caused by insufficient resolution (for example, the images the user sees appear separated from the screen). Higher resolution than mobile phones. Therefore, we hope that the resolution of VR devices will continue to be the focus of big companies in the next few years, and the GPU in the VR chip should be good enough to support high screens.

In addition to GPU, other IP false IP is an intelligent intelligence of VR chips. Unlike normal phone numbers, many files of VR Tools must have protection protection. For example, especially the VR property is the place and the customer supplies, and provide information that needs to be the best in virtual space. One more, in the current VR Tools, the interaction has increased the technology such as a decorative manner, we are increased . Finally, the error is also the technology of the bearing of the GPU bearding beard. The screen problem increases and user quality photos are good, but will be carefully looking at the pixel. Therefore, the eye seeks using technology together on the effort to show the resolution of the resolution . The rendering is well reduced and reduce the pressure of GPU. Now, these technology used in Sony's PSVR2 and have to use a lot of VR property for future.

From the above analysis, we can see that the intelligence of VR devices is more important than that of mobile phones. Because these intelligence models, above all, are essential to guarantee the key features of the user experience, and they must be executed in the real world. Time is running out in VR equipment and it is difficult to trust the weather. The challenge of this smart design is that VR chips with integrated power and energy efficiency require enough smart equipment to support these applications.

In addition to GPU and intelligence, wireless connectivity is also an important part of the VR chip. For some good games, the current primary way is to run the game on a desktop computer and stream the image to a VR device, which requires a stable, high-speed Wi-Fi connection.

Although the demand and launch of VR chips is clear today, AR chips are still in their infancy. Compared with virtual reality, AR eyes do not need to run multiple frame renderings, but they need to be worn daily, and have a very heavy weight (like the weight of sunglasses), which allows a additional battery. Therefore, for the chip, the low power consumption needs to be further optimized. Whether in Magic Leap or Microsoft's Hololens, AR image rendering is still very important to AR glasses consumers. So GPUs in AR chips could be a matter of measuring performance with power consumption. Artificial intelligence similar to AR chips can be considered an inferior model of VR chips because AR glasses require user SLAM and support interactions such as hand tracking.

ARVR chips and China

Currently, Qualcomm plays an important role in ARVR chips, but we believe that with the growth of the ARVR market, Chinese chip companies have an important opportunity.

We believe that the basic architecture of ARVR chips is similar to that of smartphone chips, except they differ slightly in performance and importance of IP for smartphone chips. Cellular network modems, for example, are an important part of smartphone chips and areas that the Chinese chip industry has long used to capture, but wireless cellphones are not the key to AVVR. Extensive experience in IP, GPU, AI acceleration, etc. So, from the design point of view, we have high expectations as long as the chip company in China can work with the company's ARVR interference equipment to better understand the specific requirements of the chip. A chip company in China could enter the ARVR space in the next few years.

From another point of view, ARVR chips have a strong power consumption and power consumption requirement, so advanced semiconductor technology requires good performance for high-performance chips. Over the next few years, solid-state processors (7nm and below) were developed. Now China's semiconductor electronics industry needs to take more and more advantage from the development of ARVR chips, which is not only the process of semiconductor chips, but also a much more sustainable technology such as the advanced packaging which can improve the whole electricity consumption. In other countries. . Dimension. .