Recently, the domestic VR company IDEALENS held a new product launch in Beijing, officially released the mobile VR K2 and K2 Pro, and launched the Chinese brand name "Qi." It is worth noting that during the press conference, Samsung VP BEN HUR of Samsung Electronics System Marketing Group Xu Guotai made a speech and announced that it had reached cooperation with Qi Zhi VR.
Photo: Samsung Electronics System LSI Marketing Department VP BEN HUR Xu Guo
At the press conference, K2 Pro also became the focus of media attention, in addition to the official release of K2 and the exact time to market. This is because the K2 Pro will be equipped with Samsung's top-of-the-line Exynos 8890 custom VR processor. This is Samsung's first custom processor for VR all-in-one devices, showing the degree of cooperation between the two parties.
This custom version of the processor increases the core frequency of the GPU and CPU compared to the standard version, reduces the number of CPU cores, enhances the single task's graphics rendering capability while maintaining low power consumption. Specifically, Exynos 8890 custom version VR chip is equipped with Mali T880 12-core GPU, the overall core frequency from 650MHz to 702MHz, enhanced graphics rendering capabilities. In addition, the Exynos 8890 custom VR chip's core Big CPU core frequency is directly overclocked from the highest 2.3GHz to 2.6GHz, and the single task processing capability is enhanced.
Figure: Comparison of Exynos 8890M (Standard Edition) and Exynos 8890 VR Edition Specifications
In addition, while raising the frequency, in order to reduce the power consumption, the Exynos 8890 VR processor will change the original architecture of the 4 cores + 4 small cores into 2 large cores + 4 small core architectures and remove 2 large cores. For products with more single-task operation scenarios such as VR, the reduction in the number of cores does not bring much impact, but power consumption and costs can be better controlled. In addition, most VR all-in-one machines do not need to bundle radio frequency chipsets, that is, support 3G, 4G Internet calls and other functions, so the 8890VR version removes the mobile baseband model, further reducing power consumption and chip costs.
More importantly, Samsung announced that it will cooperate with Qishi VR to launch VR Solution based on Exynos chips. Samsung's cooperation with Qishi may mean that the competition in the VR industry chain has begun.
For VR processors, BEN HUR said that in terms of CPU performance, Exynos R&D will replay the side to improve GPU performance, and we expect to maintain this strategy in the next few years.
In the global mobile chip market, the current three giants are Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek. The market share varies. Apart from the mobile phone market, the demand for mobile chips is saturated, and in the future, the emerging markets in the chip industry can also be affected. VR/ The AR industry has the greatest potential. For Samsung, it is possible to cooperate with a strong VR technology vendor and provide VR overall solutions based on Exynos chips. The VR market will be opened jointly by ODM. In the future, Exynos chips can further expand their influence in the VR field. The volume.
In this cooperation, Samsung sees a renewed vision. First, it has rich R&D experience and has the overall R&D strength from software to hardware. Second, Kaishi currently has nearly 200 patent applications, and most of them are accumulated in optical technologies. Certain core technical barriers; Third, Kai-vision has now opened up ODM cooperation, in addition to VR head display also has layout in AR and panoramic cameras.
From the perspective of the entire industry chain, the advent of the VR era will certainly have an impact on the industry structure of the entire upstream supply chain. Samsung Exynos saw the "gold mine" of mobile VR earlier and collaborated with in-depth development of VR Solution to develop VR Solution. According to BEN HUR, Samsung is even considering establishing a new brand of Exynos VR.