With the advancement of technology, smart homes have become an integral part of modern life. Smart home systems can achieve intelligent control and management of home equipment through technologies such as the Internet of Things, improving the convenience and comfort of life.
The importance of chips for smart home companies is self-evident. The core chips of smart homes mainly include main control chips, communication chips, sensor chips, etc. Among them, the main control chip is the core part of the smart home, which can achieve the control and management of equipment. Generally speaking, the main control chip is also known as the "brain" that controls the operation of the device, and the main control chip of smart home equipment is usually used in conjunction with SoC or MCU.
01
What is the difference between SoC and MCU?
SoC chip (System on Chip), also known as a system-level chip or a system-on-a-chip, is a chip circuit that integrates key components of a system such as CPU, GPU, NPU, memory, baseband, ISP, DSP, etc., on a single chip, capable of realizing the complete system function.
Domestic semiconductor companies in this field include: Amlogic, Rockchip, Allwinner Technology, Fudan Microelectronics, Heng Xuan Technology, Beijing Junzheng, etc.
MCU (Microcontroller Unit) chip, also known as a microcontroller or a microcontroller, is a chip that appropriately reduces the frequency and specifications of the CPU, and integrates peripherals such as memory (Memory), counters (Timer), USB, A/D conversion, UART, PLC, DMA, and even LCD driver circuits on a single chip, forming a chip-level computer to achieve terminal control functions.
MCU is one of the main chips for intelligent controllers, and representative domestic companies include: GigaDevice, Novatek, National Technology, Chipsea Technology, Bochuang Integrated, Espressif Systems, Super Micro, Fudan Microelectronics, etc.The difference between MCU and SoC lies in the fact that MCU is a microcontroller unit, a small computer on a single integrated circuit, which includes a processor core, memory, programmable input/output (I/O) peripherals, timers, counters, etc. It only provides minimal memory, interfaces, and processing capabilities. On the other hand, SoC is a system on a chip, which integrates multiple electronic components into one chip to achieve specific functions. SoC is not limited to MCU, but can also be customized versions of higher-end CPUs and MPUs. In short, SoC usually has stronger computing power, more integrated functions, and can support complex systems that run multiple tasks, of course, the price is also more expensive. And SoC is usually capable of running computing tasks, such as implementing voice recognition functions, while MCU is mostly used for control, such as acting as a motor control driver.
To better fit the current smart home ecosystem, it is necessary to design SoC/MCU that is more in line with the requirements. To this end, various manufacturers have also launched corresponding products. So, who is the best candidate in the smart home market?
For example, in the MCU route, GigaDevice's GD32 series products are suitable for industrial automation, human-machine interfaces, motor control, security monitoring, smart home appliances, and the Internet of Things, and have launched a variety of products.
The N32 general-purpose secure MCU series products of National Technology meet the application needs in various segments such as white home appliances, black home appliances, kitchen and bathroom appliances, and life appliances, and have been introduced into benchmark customers in the home appliance industry.
The MCU products of Winner Micro can be applied to inverter refrigerators and washing machines. The high-reliability MCU products of Chipsea Technology have entered the fields of gas sensors, smart meters, and optical modules for communication, and will accelerate the research and development and promotion of equipment monitoring and control products.
For example, in the SoC route, Amlogic's smart TV chips have been used in well-known TV brands such as TCL, Skyworth, and Xiaomi; AI audio and video system terminal chips have entered the supply chain of smart speakers of Baidu, Google, Amazon, and Xiaomi.
Allwinner Technology's R series SoC has entered the supply chain of Tmall Genie smart speakers, Roborock's sweeping robots, and Midea's smart air conditioners; iFLYTEK's translation pens are equipped with V series products, Tencent Penguin Aurora boxes are equipped with H series products; in the field of wireless communication, Xiaogu Wisdom Point Reading Pens are equipped with XR series chips; in the field of intelligent voice interaction, Xiaodu is equipped with AC series chips.
02
Smart Home SoC, Heading Towards 8KRockchip
As a leading AIOT SoC chip supplier in China, Rockchip's product line covers the application needs of multiple fields. In recent years, a series of chip solutions launched by Rockchip have attracted widespread attention in the market, among which RK3568, RK3588, and RK3566 are some of the most concerned products.
The RK3568 is a high-performance, low-power chip solution that adopts a quad-core A55 architecture and a quad-core A76 architecture, providing excellent computing and graphics processing performance. In addition, it supports multiple interfaces such as 4K H.265 decoding and encoding, USB3.0, HDMI2.0, MIPI-CSI2, and Gigabit Ethernet, with high scalability. In terms of application, RK3568 is mainly used in smart TVs, smart projectors, smart homes, smart locks, and other fields, providing these smart devices with better performance and experience.
The RK3566 is also a high-performance, low-power chip solution that adopts a quad-core A55 architecture and a dual-core A75 architecture, providing excellent computing and graphics processing performance. In addition, it supports multiple interfaces such as 4K H.265 decoding and encoding, USB3.0, HDMI2.0, MIPI-CSI2, and Gigabit Ethernet, with high scalability. In terms of application, RK3566 is mainly used in smart TVs, smart projectors, smart homes, smart locks, and other fields, providing these smart devices with better performance and experience.
Among them, the RK3588 is the focus of this discussion. To compare with the 8K ultra-high-definition smart set-top box SoC chip products of Amlogic, the details of this product will be elaborated in the following text.
In addition to the above products, Rockchip's products for smart speakers include RK3326, RK3308, etc.; products for sweeping robots include RK3326, RK1808, RK3308, etc.; products for home appliance voice control include RK3308, RK3229, etc.; products for home smart central control include RK3368, RK3308, PX30, etc.
Amlogic
As a leading enterprise in the field of smart audio and video SoC in China, Amlogic uses chips in smart set-top boxes, smart TVs, and AI audio and video system terminals, such as the TCL, Skyworth, Xiaomi, Baidu, Google, and Amazon mentioned above. It can be said that Amlogic's products have occupied our living rooms.
Amlogic's smart home chip products include A113X, S928X, etc.
The A113X is a high-performance, low-power, and low-cost smart voice chip. With the computing power of a strong 4-core 64-bit architecture CPU, A113X does not need to add a dedicated DSP chip to support mainstream far-field pickup schemes. It supports 8 PDM channels and multiple I2S channels, has a rich and flexible microphone array and audio input and output interfaces, and an excellent audio processing engine that supports all mainstream high-resolution audio formats. It can work seamlessly with the CPU to accelerate multimedia operation algorithms and improve user experience. It is the perfect choice for smart speakers and smart home applications and has been used by some of the most innovative voice assistant devices on the market.The Sengled smart speaker light and Lenovo's Smart Clock Essential both utilize this chip.
Nowadays, 8K audio-visual equipment has begun to gain popularity. Compared to 4K, 8K has unique advantages in promotion, with the entire industry chain, including content production, transmission, decoding, and display, already mature. Some industry clients are vigorously promoting 8K products.
As the core processor of smart home devices, the smart home SoC needs to support the decoding and playback of 8K video content to meet market demand.
03
Comparison of Two 8K SoCs
Rockchip RK3588
Rockchip's new flagship SoC chip, the RK3588, is a powerful chip that integrates various high-performance components, including CPU, GPU, NPU, and multimedia processing engines.
The CPU part of the RK3588 adopts an eight-core architecture with four A76 cores and four A55 cores, with a clock speed of up to 2.4GHz, offering strong computing power and multitasking capabilities. The GPU part integrates the ARM G610MP4, supporting multiple graphics interfaces such as OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.2, and Vulkan 1.2, providing an efficient and smooth graphics processing experience.What stands out even more is that the RK3588 comes with a built-in NPU (Neural Network Processor) with a computing power of 6 TOPs, supporting mixed operations of INT4/INT8/INT16/FP16. It can easily handle various complex neural network algorithms. This feature makes the RK3588 highly valuable in fields such as artificial intelligence and deep learning.
In addition to its powerful computing capabilities, the RK3588 also integrates a variety of multimedia processing engines, including video encoders/decoders, image processors, and audio processors. These engines support high-definition video playback, image processing, and audio processing in various formats, making the RK3588 widely applicable in the multimedia field.
Furthermore, the RK3588 also has high-performance storage and communication interfaces, which can meet various high-speed data transmission and storage needs. It also supports multiple operating systems and programming languages, facilitating developers in software development and debugging.
The RK3588 can be widely applied in various fields, such as smart terminals, the Internet of Things, smart homes, etc.
Amlogic S928X
The S928X is the first 8K ultra-high-definition smart set-top box SoC chip from Amlogic Semiconductor. The Amlogic S928X SoC chip integrates a 64-bit large-core ARM Cortex-A76 and a quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 central processor (CPU), an ARM Mali-G57 MC2 graphics processor (GPU), and a self-developed AI processor (NPU) with a computing power of up to 3.2 Tops. Its powerful computing and processing capabilities bring superior performance and energy efficiency to terminal devices.
Officially, Amlogic Semiconductor S928X can provide consumers with more stunning color saturation, more delicate and clear picture quality, and a strong sense of depth and texture in the environment of 8K ultra-high-definition resolution (7680*4320), 60FPS frame rate, and 10-bit color depth. The Amlogic Semiconductor S928X supports 8Kp60 video processing capabilities under global mainstream video formats such as AV1, H.265, VP9, AVS3, and AVS2.
The Amlogic S928X chip also integrates a wealth of peripheral interfaces, including SDIO, I2S, PCIe, UART, USB, I2C, and SPI, greatly expanding its peripheral connection devices and accelerating the scale deployment and commercial use of partner products.
Skyworth Digital's first 8K ultra-high-definition box is equipped with Amlogic Semiconductor's most advanced 8K main chip solution, supporting the decoding and playback of 8K video signals, preparing for the upcoming era of 8K picture quality. ZTE's 8K set-top box is also equipped with this chip.RK3588 vs S928X: A Showdown in Performance
In terms of manufacturing process technology, Rockchip RK3588 utilizes an 8nm process, while Amlogic S928X employs a 12nm process.
Comparing the CPU, GPU, and NPU, S928X features a five-core CPU architecture with a single ARM A76 core and four A55 cores, and a dual-core G57 GPU. RK3588, on the other hand, adopts an eight-core CPU architecture with four ARM Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 cores, and a four-core G610 GPU. It can be seen that under single-threaded application scenarios, the performance of S928X and RK3588 is close, but RK3588 has an advantage in multi-threaded applications.
The NPU of S928X can provide a computational power of 4 TOPS @int8, while RK3588 is equipped with a three-core NPU with an internal 6 TOPS @int8. In terms of pure computational power, RK3588 has a more significant advantage.
However, looking at the use scenarios for home audio and video, the 4 TOPS computational power of S928X is more than sufficient, whether it is for voice algorithms, image algorithms, simple semantic processing, or image processing, it can handle all these tasks.
In terms of encoding and decoding capabilities, RK3588 still has an advantage, but in the application of home audio and video, multi-channel video decoding is rarely needed, and its encoding capabilities can meet the performance requirements of the vast majority of products.
In the comparison of expansion interfaces, RK3588 has a large number of IP cores, whether it is high-speed interfaces or general communication interfaces, they are very abundant. However, it is difficult for a single product to utilize all these interfaces, and each functional IP means additional cost. S928X also integrates commonly used interfaces, and some interfaces can also be implemented through bridging chips.
04
Smart Home, The Trillion-Dollar Market is Coming SoonThe concept of smart homes has always captivated the public's imagination and has long moved from the realm of science fiction into reality.
China's smart home industry is currently in a period of rapid development. With the gradual application of technologies such as artificial intelligence and 5G, the continuous development of smart home hardware equipment in China and the increasing consumer demand, the industry is expected to remain in a period of rapid development over the next five years. Combining the historical growth rate of China's smart home industry, it is predicted that by 2029, the market size of China's smart home industry will reach 10.9 trillion yuan.
As competition in the smart home chip field becomes increasingly fierce, the internal competitive landscape of this market is expected to become even more intense in the future. The future of smart home chips will not be limited to a single dimension of "computing power competition" and "collaborative deepening," but will be fully unfolded.
For example, with the continuous increase and complexity of smart home device functions, the demand for chip computing power is also continuously increasing. Devices such as robotic vacuum cleaners and smart locks require higher computing power to support their complex calculations and decision-making processes; various devices in the smart home system need to achieve efficient interconnection to provide a more convenient and intelligent home experience. As the core component of the device, the chip needs to support multiple communication protocols and interface standards to achieve seamless connection and data exchange between devices.
With the widespread application and popularity of smart home devices, their security issues have also attracted increasing attention. Future smart home chips will pay more attention to the improvement of security performance, and protect the data security and user privacy of the device by integrating security modules and algorithms.
It can be determined that, driven by the current wave of technology, smart home chip companies are standing at the forefront of industry transformation and are about to usher in an unprecedented period of dividends.
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