The Hot Spot of Semiconductor is Transferring from CPU to AP

Published:2012/4/19 4:14:00 Author:Li xiao na From:SeekIC

Nowadays, the hot spot of semiconductor market is transferring from CPU to AP all over the world. The Snapdragon、Exynos、OMAP are leading the processor market, and Samsung has taken the largest market share. How will the industry structure change in the future?

With the growing sales of intelligent device, the application processor market will have an explosive growth. Although the global processor market had only 10 billion US dollars of sales in 2011, which has presented a sharp contrast to CPU’s sales, the sales of application processor market will reach 38 billion in the year of 2015. The shipment of intelligent device is larger than PC, but the price of application processor is only one fifth of the processor.

It is predicated that the application processor market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 49% in future five years. The world’s semiconductor market is experiencing a shift from CPU to AP.

Application processor is developing to the direction of multi-core, which reduces the chip amount of every wafer; meanwhile, the ASP of application processor goes high. A wafer of 12 inch can produce 373 pieces of four-core processor. Relatively speaking, the same wafer can produce more than 12000 pieces of one-core processor or 559 pieces of dual core processor. Actually, to expand the capacity of the manufacturers is essential to the core processor’s improvement.

The kernel of ARM CPU is developing from Cortex- A8 to A9 to A15, and the move speed of application processor also improves from 1GHz to 2.0GHz, and to 2.5GHz. With the release of Windows 8, the application processor has the possibility to be used by PC. The application processor can be used by PC in the second half of 2012, and the fastest move speed can be 2.5GHz at that time. The price of AP is only one quarter of CPU’s. What is more, the low end PC has more possibility to use application processor.

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