TrendForce reports that the recently unveiled Apple Vision Pro at this year’s WWDC is poised to revolutionize the AR/VR market with its sleek design and high-performance capabilities. However, the complexity behind its production and its limited production capacity present significant challenges, leading to a projected initial release in the US during 1H24. Furthermore, considering factors such as pricing and the absence of certain essential features, TrendForce anticipates a modest shipment volume of approximately 200,000 units for Apple Vision Pro in 2024. The market’s response will heavily depend on the subsequent introduction of consumer-oriented Apple Vision models and the ability of Apple to offer enticing everyday functionalities that will drive the rapid growth of the AR market as a whole.

TrendForce also notes that the Apple Vision Pro boasts cutting-edge hardware specifications and innovative design. However, a substantial price tag of US$3,499 and the requirement for an external power source to operate for a mere two hours pose challenges to consumer adoption. Currently, the Apple Vision Pro lacks sufficient applications for mainstream users, making it more attractive to developers and enterprise customers who can capitalize on its innovative features to create diverse applications. Consequently, the higher price point of the product is justified.

Looking ahead, Apple has the opportunity to fine-tune the product specifications based on the usage patterns of various features in Vision Pro. This will pave the way for the launch of a distinct offering, Apple Vision, which will cater to the budgetary constraints of general consumers while optimizing battery life. As such, WWDC 2023 primarily focuses on the concept of spatial computing, setting the stage for the anticipation of more practical AR applications to be showcased at WWDC 2024. These applications will be tailored towards usage in daily life, including seamless integration with other Apple products for information retrieval and effortless command execution.

Will AIGC Bring New Development Boost to MR?

According to TrendForce, it is difficult to see AIGC exerting influence in the MR field in the short term due to the need for corresponding AI models and tools to be established. Currently, the AR/VR market is not large, and coupled with the complexity of content development, it is challenging to attract AIGC’s development in this area in the short term.

Furthermore, the complexity and cost of entry into the MR field, along with limited market size, have caused many brand manufacturers to focus on small-scale commercial products. This is because such products have a high unit price and low quantity, allowing manufacturers to control the total cost within a manageable range while capitalizing on the AR/VR industry trend. However, it does not mean that manufacturers are willing to heavily invest in this market.

Overall, this is the biggest difference in strategy between Apple and these manufacturers. Apple indeed wants to aggressively develop the AR market, but the lack of market understanding and content applications led to the introduction of developer products like Vision Pro. The purpose is twofold: to allow developers to advance in content application development and to gather feedback on hardware design and features used by developers. This feedback helps Apple determine which hardware design and features to retain or discard when launching new consumer products that closely align with content application needs.

Recently, there has been news of collaboration between NVIDIA and MediaTek. Speculation suggests that the future collaboration may extend to smartphone SoCs, allowing MediaTek to enhance the graphical computing and AI performance of Dimensity smartphone SoCs through NVIDIA’s GPU technology licensing.

Currently, the focus of this collaboration is primarily on NB SoC development, with some progress in the automotive-related chip sector. As for the scope of smartphone SoC collaboration, it is still under discussion, but the potential for related partnerships is worth noting.

In the announced collaboration between NVIDIA and MediaTek for the NB SoC products, MediaTek is mainly responsible for CPU, while other part such as GPU, DSP, ISP, and interface IP are provided by NVIDIA or external partners. NVIDIA holds the leadership position, while MediaTek plays a supporting role in this collaboration.

Regarding the industry’s speculation about possible collaboration in smartphone SoC development, it is estimated that MediaTek will take the lead in the design. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the motivations behind MediaTek’s adoption of related technologies.

Firstly, since the era of the Arm V9 instruction set, Arm’s reference GPU, Immortalis, has incorporated ray tracing functionality, assisting MediaTek’s flagship SoCs in improving gaming performance. This indicates that optimizing gaming scenarios is a key development focus for SoC manufacturers.

However, for high-end gaming applications, the current GPU performance of smartphone SoCs still cannot maintain high frame rates and native resolutions during gameplay. While selecting a pure core stacking approach to improve computational power is effective, it puts pressure on device power consumption. In light of this, Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (GSR) technology this year, which simultaneously reduces power consumption and enhances game graphics quality. MediaTek has not yet explored this technology, and Arm Immortalis has not been released. Therefore, when it comes to GPU performance computing, MediaTek has incentives to seek external collaborations.

Furthermore, with the rapid upgrading of GPUs on smartphone SoCs, PC-level games are now being introduced to smartphones, and industry players are promoting compatibility with graphics APIs, opening doors for NVIDIA, AMD, and even Intel to enter the mobile gaming market. Samsung has partnered with AMD for its Exynos SoC GPU, while NVIDIA, with similar technology to Qualcomm Snapdragon GSR, becomes a logical choice as a cooperation partner for MediaTek.

TrendForce believes that if MediaTek integrates NVIDIA GPUs into Dimensity SoCs and leverages TSMC’s process power efficiency advantages, it could bring a new wave of excitement to MediaTek in the flagship or gaming device market, attracting consumer interest. However, despite the potential technical benefits of collaboration, considering the influence of geopolitical factors, MediaTek, which primarily sells its smartphone SoCs to Chinese customers, may ultimately abandon this collaboration option due to related policy risks.

The excitement surrounding ChatGPT has sparked a new era in generative AI. This fresh technological whirlwind is revolutionizing everything, from cloud-based AI servers all the way down to edge-computing in smartphones.

Given that generative AI has enormous potential to foster new applications and boost user productivity, smartphones have unsurprisingly become a crucial vehicle for AI tech. Even though the computational power of an end device isn’t on par with the cloud, it has the double benefit of reducing the overall cost of computation and protecting user privacy. This is primarily why smartphone OEMs started using AI chips to explore and implement new features a few years ago.

However, Oppo’s recent decision to shut down its chip design company, Zheku, casted some doubts on the future of smartphone OEMs’ self-developed chips, bringing the smartphone AI chip market into focus.

Pressing Needs to Speed Up AI Chips Iterations

The industry’s current approach to running generative AI models on end devices involves two-pronged approaches: software efforts focus on reducing the size of the models to lessen the burden and energy consumption of chips, while the hardware side is all about increasing computational power and optimizing energy use through process shrinkage and architectural upgrades.

IC design houses, like Qualcomm with its Snapdragon8 Gen.2, are now hurrying to develop SoC products that are capable of running these generative AI base models.
Here’s the tricky part though: models are constantly evolving at a pace far exceeding the SoC development cycle – with updates like GPT occurring every six months. This gap between hardware iterations and new AI model advancements might only get wider, making the rapid expansion of computational requirements the major pain point that hardware solution providers need to address.

Top-tier OEMs pioneering Add-on AI Accelerators

It’s clear that in this race for AI computational power, the past reliance on SoCs is being challenged. Top-tier smartphone OEMs are no longer merely depending on standard products from SoC suppliers. Instead, they’re aggressively adopting AI accelerator chips to fill the computational gap.

The approaches of integrating and add-on AI accelerator were first seen in 2017:

• Integrated: This strategy is represented by Huawei’s Kirin970 and Apple’s A11 Bionic, which incorporated an AI engine within SoC.
• Add-on: Initially implemented by Google Pixel 2, which used a custom Pixel Visual Core chip alongside Snapdragon 835. It wasn’t until the 2021 Pixel 6 series, which introduced Google’s self-developed Tensor SoC, that the acceleration unit was directly integrated into the Tensor.

Clearly, OEMs with self-developing SoC+ capabilities usually embed their models into AI accelerators at the design stage. This hardware-software synergy supplies the required computing power for specific AI scenarios.

New Strategic Models on the Rise

For OEMs without self-development capabilities, the hefty cost of SoC development keeps them reliant on chip manufacturers’ SoC iterations. Yet, they’re also applying new strategies within the supply chain to keep pace with swift changes.

Here’s the interesting part – brands are leveraging simpler specialized chips to boost AI-enabled applications, making standalone ICs like ISPs(Image Signal Processors) pivotal for new features of photography and display. Meanwhile, we’re also seeing potential advancements in the field of productivity tools – from voice assistants to photo editing – where the implementation of small-scale ASICs is seriously being considered to fulfill computational demands.

From Xiaomi’s collaboration with Altek and Vivo’s joint effort with Novatek to develop ISPs, the future looks bright for ASIC development, opening up opportunities for small-scale IC design and IP service providers.

Responding to the trend, SoC leader MediaTek is embracing an open 5G architecture strategy for market expansion through licensing and custom services. However, there’s speculation about OEMs possibly replacing MediaTek’s standard IP with self-developed ones for deeper product differentiation.

Looking at this, it’s clear that the battle of AI chips continues with no winning strategy for speeding up smartphone AI chip product iteration.

Considering the substantial resources required for chip development and the saturation of the smartphone market, maintaining chip-related strategies adds a layer of uncertainty for OEMs.With Oppo’s move to discontinue its chip R&D, other brands like Vivo and Xiaomi are likely reconsidering their game plans. The future, therefore, warrants close watch.

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AI Sparks a Revolution Up In the Cloud

TV sales in China hit their peak in 2019, with 44.5 million units sold, but the market experienced a sharp decline in 2020. This was due to the previous marketing strategy of lowering prices to increase sales volume no longer being effective for small and medium-sized products. In response, brands shifted their focus to larger-sized products, specifically those with a screen size of 65 inches or above, which has accelerated the trend of larger TVs dominating the market.

Panel prices skyrocketed between 2020 and 2021, causing a significant price disparity for TV products during promotional events in China. In the 2021 618 promotion, 55-inch TV prices surged by 67% compared to the previous year, while 65-inch TVs increased by 50%, leading to a surge in demand for larger TV sizes. TVs with a screen size of 55 inches and above accounted for over 65% of the market share in China in 2021, and it is anticipated to reach 80% by 2022. With greater discounts, 65-inch TVs became the mainstream size in 2022, surpassing 55-inch TVs in sales volume and market share. The market share of smaller TVs (43 inches and below) fell from roughly 30% to 16%.

According to recent market research, the dominance of smart TVs has surged from 85% in 2016 to a staggering 98% in 2022. Additionally, the popularity of 4K TVs has risen rapidly, with an 80% market share in 2022, following their introduction in 2014. The shift towards these new TV standards has been fueled by ongoing price cuts in the retail sector and the growing demand for larger screen sizes.

The scale of promotions during China’s 618 and Double Eleven shopping festivals could be affected by the upward trend of larger screen sizes and the rise in panel prices in 2023. As a result, brands are expected to shift their promotional strategies towards larger TVs, particularly 75-inch and 85-inch models, which generate more revenue. Consequently, TV sales in China for this year are predicted to decline further by 1.7%, with an estimated sales volume of approximately 30 million units.v

Due to geopolitical and pandemic, Apple has been accelerating the diversification of its supply sources, with India being the most well-known case for such transfer. According to TrendForce, India’s Tata Group is expected to become the fourth iPhone assembler for Apple. Following Apple’s pattern, new suppliers receive smaller orders for lower-end models, which means Tata Group will initially get only small orders for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.

TrendForce thinks the small order has 3 implications in Apple’s relocation plan:

First, Tata, the largest conglomerate in India, has received orders for iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, indicating that India will become the first wave of shipments for new iPhone series.

Second, the reason why Tata is able to produce iPhone is due to the acquisition of Wistron’s Indian production line. Therefore, Tata’s entry also means Wistron’s exit from the iPhone assembly business.

Last, Tata is the fourth company to undertake iPhone assembly business after Luxshare joined in 2020 for iPhone 12 Pro Max assembly.

TrendForce emphasized that although Tata’s share of assembly orders for various iPhone models is only 5% in 2023, it still shows an accelerating trend of Apple’s production relocation.