A 5G Chipset Reality Check

Qualcomm rivals need more than bold claims to close the gap

The mobile industry is used to bold claims of leadership and heated debate about whose chipset, device or network is the greatest, fastest, most efficient, most reliant, best performing and so on. It’s one of the reasons why our industry is many things, but certainly never dull. However, sometimes companies make assertions that do little to foster opportunities and end up being counterproductive to the market at large. The intensity of competition in 5G launches is creating exactly this dynamic.

A good example is the grudge between T-Mobile and Verizon in the US about whose 5G network approach is best. The realities of spectrum allocation and differing strategic priorities get lost amid the squabble, as does the fact that both carriers will ultimately deploy a mix of low-, mid- and high-band spectrum to create competitive 5G networks. It leads to short-term confusion and mistrust, which the wider industry must then try and resolve.

Huawei’s recent launch of its P40 smartphone series and Kirin 990 chipset is another example. The Chinese phone-maker has introduced a line-up of very capable devices, albeit limited by the lack of Google services which will restrict their appeal outside China. The P40 series is a strong product set in its own right, but in its marketing, Huawei makes several claims about the P40 relative to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865. It’s an approach that the company also chose when it launched its Mate Xs device with the Kirin 990 chipset. The problem here isn’t just about the merits of claims compared with a rival, but the risk of creating broader confusion and misunderstanding at a crucial time for 5G.

The Snapdragon 865 platform has more than 70 designs announced or in development, and is favoured by the vast majority of newly announced 5G devices in recent weeks. It builds on the Snapdragon 855 platform, which almost exclusively powered the first wave of 5G devices in 2019, and is supported by the Snapdragon 765 and 765G. Later in 2020, Qualcomm will introduce 5G to its Snapdragon 6 series platform.

These points are important proof of the scale that Snapdragon is enabling. Launches of 5G devices are coming from a breadth of manufacturers, which has never been seen so early in a transition to a new network generation. Furthermore, device prices are starting from as low as $400. No other chipset provider is supporting products at this scale.

This is a very different undertaking to enabling a small number of products within a single manufacturer’s portfolio. Although Qualcomm isn’t the only 5G chipset supplier and will face mounting competition, it has a significant head start thanks to its leadership in 4G, early investment in 5G and its prominent role in the development and testing of 5G networks and chipsets. The company has also made several design and technology choices that give it the edge over competitors.

One of these decisions is in millimetre-wave technology. Rivals claim a smaller advantage in board area over Snapdragon, but none have done so with support for millimetre-wave spectrum. Their argument is that millimetre wave adds unnecessary expense, complexity and is only a market requirement in the US, as most other regions are focusing on sub-6 GHz spectrum. We believe this will change rapidly as other countries including South Korea and Japan support millimetre-wave technology in 2020, with China and much of Europe following in 2021.

Qualcomm’s X55 modem in the Snapdragon 865 also has a strong sub-6 GHz capability, with support for 200 MHz aggregation offering double the peak speeds of rival solutions, up to 5 Gbps. Moreover, the investment the company has made to create a fully integrated modem-RF system overcomes much of the 5G complexity on behalf of manufacturing partners. Manufacturers can choose a chipset platform and supporting RF components such as filters, power amplifiers, multiplexers and antenna tuners, knowing they’re fully compatible and highly optimized. This has a big impact on performance as well as time-to-market.

The Snapdragon 865 reinforces Qualcomm’s position, thanks to its strength in artificial intelligence, graphics and computing, spanning application processors, digital signal processors, image signal processors and GPUs. This is admittedly subjective, and different benchmarks will favour varying attributes from one platform to another. Qualcomm’s complete system consistency and performance is an important factor to understand. The real-world performance of the entire system-on-chip is far more important than a particular benchmark for a particular processor.

Nonetheless, the Snapdragon 865 AI Engine consistently leads using ResNet-34, Inception V3, MobileNet SSD and DeepLab V3+ classification networks. We’ll have to assess Huawei’s P40 series leadership claims on artificial intelligence when it launches. However, Qualcomm’s advantage extends beyond hardware specifications and capabilities to the supporting ecosystem, which ensures the system is optimized for a range of apps and functions. This is where scale is really important and ensures a long tail of apps and experiences are optimized for the platform.

Claims from Qualcomm’s rivals should be weighed against where and why Qualcomm leads and the competitive gaps that competitors need to bridge. Chipset players must avoid point-scoring in 5G that only clouds the bigger opportunity for the industry at large.