This week we released our multi-core smartphone applications processors (AP) market share numbers and based on our estimates the multi-core smartphone AP market showed very strong 180 percent sequential growth in Q3 2011.
Some highlights from our multi-core smartphone AP quarterly market share tracker:
- Multi-core smartphone APs gained strong traction in Q3 2011 and accounted for almost one fourth of total smartphone APs shipped in Q3 2011. Strategy Analytics attributes this growth to strong holiday quarter demand for flagship multi-core smartphones from major smartphone manufacturers.
- Samsung topped the multi-core smartphone AP market with 57 percent unit shipment share in Q3 2011, followed by Qualcomm with 18 percent, Texas Instruments and NVIDIA.
- Despite being somewhat late to market with dual-core processors, Texas Instruments ranked number three and took 13 percent share in the multi-core smartphone AP market in Q3 2011, thanks to its high-profile design-wins.
- NVIDIA ranked number four with 10 percent unit share in the smartphone multi-core AP market in Q3 2011. NVIDIA lost key design-wins to TI at Motorola. Neverthless, we believe that NVIDIA did very well in the mobile processor market in its first year and despite being a newcomer scored multiple design-wins. We believe NVIDIA can carry forward some lessons learned in 2011 and the company should focus on high quality design-wins and product portfolio expansion to gain volume share.
- ST-Ericsson had just 1 percent unit shipment share in the multi-core smartphone AP market in Q3 2011, by our estimates. Strategy Analytics believes that ST-Ericsson's Nova and NovaThor processors have the potential to be an attractive alternative to Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors.
- We believe Broadcom, Marvell, Renesas and MediaTek have some catching up to do to capture market share in the multi-core smartphone AP market.
- In contrast to the single-core processor market, stand-alone APs dominated the multi-core smartphone AP market and accounted for 90 percent of total multi-core smartphone APs shipped in Q3 2011.
Strategy Analytics projects that multi-core APs will account for 17 percent of total smartphone APs shipped in 2011, up from almost negligible shipments in 2010. We expect Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and NVIDIA to be prime beneficiaries from this growth and to account for almost 100 percent of multi-core smartphone APs shipped in 2011.