The University of Tokyo has developed a new chip cooling technology, whose efficiency is seven times higher than that of traditional ones.

The wave of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is surging, and it is expected to reshape the development pattern of the semiconductor industry. As one of the core links in the industry, chip design has become a key battlefield for chip competition. The global chip design industry pattern is highly concentrated. According to data from TrendForce, the total revenue of the world's top 10 chip design companies in 2024 was approximately USD 249.8 billion, with the top 5 manufacturers contributing over 90% of the total revenue. Currently, major IC design giants such as NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are actively making layouts around four key markets: mobile phones, AI PCs, automobiles, and servers. Meanwhile, driven by the rising demand for high-performance chips due to AI and the increasingly fierce market competition, the trend of collaborative cooperation in the industrial chain has become prominent. Mobile Phone Market: Significant Improvement in AI Performance of Flagship Chips AI and advanced manufacturing processes have become key words in the smartphone market. Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two major mobile phone SoC manufacturers, are competing to launch the latest flagship chips to meet market demands. Qualcomm's flagship chip, Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition, focuses on performance, AI terminals, and gaming ecosystem as its main highlights. This product adopts the second-generation 3nm process (N3E); it is equipped with dual Oryon ultra-large cores with a main frequency exceeding 4.2GHz, and its single-core performance is improved by 35%, dedicated to handling high-load tasks (such as game rendering and AI inference); it is also fitted with six custom performance cores with a main frequency of 3.5GHz, and its energy efficiency ratio is optimized by 40%, responsible for multi-task parallel processing and background management. To meet the demand for AI computing power, the Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition integrates the sixth-generation AI engine (Hexagon NPU) with a computing power of 73 TOPS (73 trillion operations per second), an increase of 45% compared with the previous generation. In terms of gaming experience, the Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition is equipped with the Adreno 830 GPU, which supports hardware-level ray tracing and global illumination, with a 25% improvement in graphics rendering speed. Through Snapdragon Elite Gaming technology, it realizes variable rate shading (VRS) and game super-resolution technology. In April this year, MediaTek officially launched the Dimensity 9400+ flagship 5G intelligent agent AI mobile chip, which provides generative AI and intelligent agent-based AI capabilities. With the characteristics of high intelligence, high performance, high energy efficiency, and low power consumption, it brings a new experience to flagship mobile phones. The Dimensity 9400+ adopts the second-generation all-large-core architecture. Its 8-core CPU includes 1 Arm Cortex-X925 ultra-large core with a main frequency of up to 3.73GHz, 3 Cortex-X4 ultra-large cores, and 4 Cortex-A720 large cores.