Inquisitive Universe:
Unisoc is not a popular name and phone manufacturers who use them do not want to make them popular.

Now if you've never heard of the names Unisoc or Spreadtrum, do not blame yourself or think you have missed a lot. Quite clearly, you haven't.

Now what/who is Unisoc?

And...

Why are they important?

Once upon a time,

There was an SoC company located in Shanghai, China dedicated to making only Entry level SoCs for Entry level phones.

The name of the company was Spreadtrum Communications Incorporated.

Spreadtrum SoCs were very cheap and soon they became really popular in South East Asia as they helped a lot of small companies make their own phones.

Eventually, even big companies like Samsung and Huawei realized that there was a lot of money to be made from selling cheap phones to the lower economic classes of the society. So they started buying SoCs from Spreadtrum too.

As Spreadtrum's popularity grew, a big Chinese investment firm known as Tsinghua Uni group bought the company for $1.75 billion (US Dollars).

Tsinghua allowed the company to keep making Spreadtrum SoCs. But in 2018, after a management change, Tsinghua decided to set their sights higher.

The Tsinghua Uni group then acquired another company known as RDA microelectronics for $907 million.

In 2018, Spreadtrum and RDA were merged and rebranded into what is now known as UNISOC. They are currently the largest producers of SoCs in China.

As a result of this merger, all Spreadtrum SoCs were now renamed Unisoc-Spreadtrum or simply Unisoc.

For the next few minutes...

We shall be looking at a company that started from the bottom, are universally disliked and their attempts to repair damaged reputation.

Spreadtrum makes very cheap low end entry level SoCs.

Their SoCs are the cheapest in the Smartphone world. This was their heritage until recently...

This is something that they have been quite successful at.

Their SC***** line of cheap SoCs are very popular in the low end smartphone market especially in Asia and Africa. Their list of customers include Samsung, Nokia, Lenovo, Teclast, Leagoo, HTC, Transsion (Itel) and many others.

Their SoC is very basic when it comes to functionality.

They're designed for calls, SMS, viewing photos and watching videos, facebook lite, Xender, Android Go etc.

Anything heavier than this and you're looking for trouble.

When it comes to gaming, photography and videography. These SoCs are mostly useless.

They have neither dedicated ISPs or DSP or AI modules. The GPUs used are the cheapest Mali GPUs produced by ARM.

These and many more make Spreadtrum SoCs cheap and very affordable.

But the companies that use these SoCs do not want their customers to know this.

This is especially true in the case of Samsung.

Now note that I have nothing against Samsung but bad business practices are bad business practices.

These companies would buy Spreadtrum SoCs and put them in their phones.

After doing this, they would promise heaven and earth, misleading the consumer. Whilst doing this, they'll of course hide the fact that they're using a Spreadtrum SoC.

To add insult to injury, they'll charge a high price for the phone.

When you check for specs, what you'll see is:

SoC - 1.2GHz Quad core Processor

The average consumers rushes to buy these devices and are sorely disappointed.

I had an old tab with a Spreadtrum SoC and it was a disaster.

In the end, the tab was a glorified television and pdf reader. That was all it was good for.

Most people who used Spreadtrum devices in the past, and later found out would have nothing to do with phones or tablets carrying Spreadtrum.

Lots of people, as soon as they hear Spreadtrum, oya, they'll take off both slippers, hold them in both hands and run.

This has contributed to the bad image that Unisoc have had over the years and still continues till today in the minds of many people.

Let's look at the SoCs that Unisoc has made over the years and let's see why they're that bad.

Let's start from 2014.

In 2014, Spreadtrum released almost 10 SoCs that year. These SoCs are all entry level with very similar specs.

The specs are:

core count: quad core
core type: Cortex A7
GPU: Mali 400 series
size: 28nm
ISA: ARMv7
clockspeed: 1.2 or 1.3GHz
memory: LPDDR2 or 3, and 3G capability.

The SoCs are:

1. SC5735A (Dexp Ursus NS370)

2. SC5735

3. SC7715 is a single core SoC (Samsung Galaxy Ace NXT and Samsung Galaxy Pocket 2)

4. SC7725 is a dual core SoC (Samsung Galaxy Z1, Samsung Galaxy J120H)

5. SC7730A (Lenovo A1900)

6. SC7730S (Samsung Galaxy Z3, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, Blu C4, Blu Advanced L4).

7. The most popular Spreadtrum SOC of that era was the SC7731C (Flare S series, Cherry Blu, MyPhone)

8. Rounding up this segment is the SC7731G (iTel vision, Huawei Y5C, Archos 40D).

These SoCs then flooded the market and were used in a number of cheap phones. They remained popular through 2015 and even competed favourable with Mediatek SoCs.

In 2016, they released a new batch of SoCs with similar specs to the ones from 2014.

The only difference was that the clockspeed was increased from 1.2GHz to 1.3/1.5GHz and these SoCs had 4G capability.

The SoCs are

1. SC9830A (Samsung Galaxy J1 mini prime and LYF Flame 7)

2. SC9830

3. SC9832A (Intex Aqua lineup, Micromax, Lenovo Z7).

In 2017, Tsinghua company started pushing Unisoc to challenge Mediatek and to set their sights higher.

Since ARM CPU cores were already dominating the market. Spreadtrum signed an unlikely agreement with tech giants Intel.

Unisoc acquired a Core license from Intel and made two SoCs.

They both had similar specs e.g 14nm, Octa core. the Intel X86-64 architecture and Intel Airmont processor cores.

The difference between them both was GPU and Clockspeed.

The SoCs are:

1. SC9851 (Leagoo T5C) used a Mali T820 GPU and ran at 1.8Ghz

2. SC9861GIA used a PowerVR GT7200 GPU and ran at 2.0GHz.

Both SoCs flopped in the market because they were not very compatible with the Android ecosystem.

After the disaster of the Intel SoCs, Unisoc went back to their old ways.

In 2018, they released 13 SoCs into the market. Some of them were popular while others were not.

To make matters worse, some of the specs used are worse than the SoCs from 2014.

1. SC8810 (Samsung Galaxy Young 2) is a single core 40nm SoC running at 1GHz with a memory of DDR1. The SoC was slower than a snail.

2. SC8825 (Lenovo A390t), which is a dual core 40nm SoC running at 1.2GHz.

The rest used the same 2014 specs and only changed the names.

They are:

1. SC7731E (Flare S series, Nokia C1, Cherry Mobile, Itel A36, Itel A56, Itel P36, Itel S15/S15 pro, Itel S16)

2. SC7735S (Samsung Galaxy Core 2, HTC Desire 700)

3. SC8735S

4. SC8830

5. SC8830A

6. SC8831G (Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 lite, Samsung Galaxy Tab E, Samsung Galaxy Grand Neo plus, Samsung Galaxy J1 Mini)

7. SC8835S.

8. The 4G SoCs like the SC9832E (Nokia C2, Samsung Galaxy J2 core, Meizu C9 Pro, Micro Spark Go, Itel A35)

9. SC9850 (Cherry mobile, Flare A+) also used those specs from 2014 as well.

That year however, Unisoc made two new SoCs based on ARMv8.1.

After years of using ARMv7 even when everyone else had upgraded, this was a welcome development for the company.

The size of the transistors were shrunk down from 28nm to 16nm. The new SoCs also used modern Cortex A53 and LPDDR4 memory. The last big change was the switch from quad core to octa core.

The two new SoCs are SC9860 and SC9860GV.

Surprisingly, they did not sell well as no company used them.

It was in this same year, 2018 that Spreadtrum were merged with RDA electronics and became UNISOC.

In 2019, the last SoCs that were branded with the Spreadtrum name were released.

They were budget SoCs with modern specs e.g ARMv8-A, Cortex A55 cores, PowerVR IMG8322 etc.

This was Unisoc's way of leaving the Entry level market behind.

1. SC9863 (Coolpad 3)

2. SC9863A (iTel Vision 1, Doogee N10, Teclast P10S, Teclast P20, Teclast P80x, Itel P36pro).

In late 2019, RDA's influence on the company was very clear.

The company made a new series of Midrange SoCs known as the Tiger T series

They boasted modern specs such as the 12nm size, ARMv8.2A, Cortex A75 and A55, LPDDR4 memory etc. They mostly shared similar specs and used a 2+6 big.LITTLE arrangement.

At last, Unisoc-spreadtrum had decided to join the modern world.

Three Tiger SoCs were released in 2019. They're:

1. Tiger T310 (Hisense F30S) with a PowerVR GT7200.

2. Tiger T618 (Teclast M40) with Mali G52 MP2

3. Tiger T710 with a PowerVR GM9446.

In 2020, the company announced their first 5G SoCs.

The Tiger T7510 (Hisense F50 5G) keeps most of the specs from 2019 while the Tiger T7520 is much more modern with 6nm process and Cortex A76 cores. It also uses a Mali G57 GPU.

Now, you cannot have 5G SoCs without a 5G modem. Unisoc have made their own 5G modem as well. It is called the Makalu IVY510 5G modem.

Unisoc is trying very hard to shake off it's bad reputation by investing heavily in research and development as well.

They have announced that their new SoCs will be able to carry out Virtual and Augmented reality tasks very soon.

The problem now is that a lot of companies who used to buy their cheap SoCs cannot afford the new Tiger line up, so they keep asking for the old Spreadtrum SoCs.

A good example is Itel.

Itel's latest brand flagship still uses the Unisoc SC9736A from 2019 in 2021.

So it may take a while for the public to accept Unisoc as one of the serious competitors in the industry.

Personally, I want Unisoc to make good SoCs. This should put pressure on the big boys such as Qualcomm and Mediatek and force them to reduce their prices.

Remember competition is always good for the customers.

So if you didn't know about Unisoc Spreadtrum SoCs.

Well now you do.

(Culled from my Telegram channel, can also be found on my Facebook page)

https://inquisitiveuniverse.com/2021/03/17/unisoc/ (Post link)

For a list of all the major SoCs:

We have

1. Apple Bionic https://www.nairaland.com/6021840/apple-silicon-socs-full-line

2. Snapdragon https://www.nairaland.com/5847896/qualcomm-snapdragon-all-need-know

3. Mediatek https://www.nairaland.com/5771618/mediatek-not-brief-summary

4. Exynos https://inquisitiveuniverse.com/2020/07/29/exynos-socs-a-full-line-up/

5. Kirin

6. Unisoc

I can't post more links so as to avoid a spambot ban. Will update it tomorrow.

No wonder my itel A56 pro dey heat up like mad. Even to play dream league na war. The way that phone dey heat up ehn, be like say ma break am. Anyway, I only bought it because I had no choice. I hate transsion. I hate transsion. I hate transsion.

Unisoc, the most useless of them all.

The5DME:
No wonder my itel A56 pro dey heat up like mad. Even to play dream league na war. The way that phone dey heat up ehn, be like say ma break am. Anyway, I only bought it because I had no choice. I hate transsion. I hate transsion. I hate transsion.

You dey use item dey play game?

If you don't know itel is for calls,messaging(lite versions of social media apps) and browsing

Anything other than that...na war

I'm not saying it won't do it oo but na war.

I've always told people that if you can't afford a reasonable new device then use that money and go for a used device that's a little better device at least. Nice write-up boss

Meister:
I've always told people that if you can't afford a reasonable new device then use that money and go for a used device that's a little better device at least. Nice write-up boss

this makes sense.

i'd rather use nokia n95 symbian phone than use any unisoc powered device

Meister:
I've always told people that if you can't afford a reasonable new device then use that money and go for a used device that's a little better device at least. Nice write-up boss

Thank you sir

atheistandproud:


Thank you sir

Again you have done justice to this topic. God bless you.


Itel how far?

Randerl:



Again you have done justice to this topic. God bless you.


Itel how far?

Thanks boss

Nice writeup boss, had to click those links and get enlightened on apple bionic, snapdragon and mtk processors..
Lol i'm patiently waiting for the article on exynos, kirin etc

atheistandproud:
Inquisitive Universe:
Unisoc is not a popular name and phone manufacturers who use them do not want to make them popular.

Now if you've never heard of the names Unisoc or Spreadtrum, do not blame yourself or think you have missed a lot. Quite clearly, you haven't.

Now what/who is Unisoc?

And...

Why are they important?

Once upon a time,

There was an SoC company located in Shanghai, China dedicated to making only Entry level SoCs for Entry level phones.

The name of the company was Spreadtrum Communications Incorporated.

Spreadtrum SoCs were very cheap and soon they became really popular in South East Asia as they helped a lot of small companies make their own phones.

Eventually, even big companies like Samsung and Huawei realized that there was a lot of money to be made from selling cheap phones to the lower economic classes of the society. So they started buying SoCs from Spreadtrum too.

As Spreadtrum's popularity grew, a big Chinese investment firm known as Tsinghua Uni group bought the company for $1.75 billion (US Dollars).

Tsinghua allowed the company to keep making Spreadtrum SoCs. But in 2018, after a management change, Tsinghua decided to set their sights higher.

The Tsinghua Uni group then acquired another company known as RDA microelectronics for $907 million.

In 2018, Spreadtrum and RDA were merged and rebranded into what is now known as UNISOC. They are currently the largest producers of SoCs in China.

As a result of this merger, all Spreadtrum SoCs were now renamed Unisoc-Spreadtrum or simply Unisoc.

For the next few minutes...

We shall be looking at a company that started from the bottom, are universally disliked and their attempts to repair damaged reputation.

Spreadtrum makes very cheap low end entry level SoCs.

Their SoCs are the cheapest in the Smartphone world. This was their heritage until recently...

This is something that they have been quite successful at.

Their SC***** line of cheap SoCs are very popular in the low end smartphone market especially in Asia and Africa. Their list of customers include Samsung, Nokia, Lenovo, Teclast, Leagoo, HTC, Transsion (Itel) and many others.

Their SoC is very basic when it comes to functionality.

They're designed for calls, SMS, viewing photos and watching videos, facebook lite, Xender, Android Go etc.

Anything heavier than this and you're looking for trouble.

When it comes to gaming, photography and videography. These SoCs are mostly useless.

They have neither dedicated ISPs or DSP or AI modules. The GPUs used are the cheapest Mali GPUs produced by ARM.

These and many more make Spreadtrum SoCs cheap and very affordable.

But the companies that use these SoCs do not want their customers to know this.

This is especially true in the case of Samsung.

Now note that I have nothing against Samsung but bad business practices are bad business practices.

These companies would buy Spreadtrum SoCs and put them in their phones.

After doing this, they would promise heaven and earth, misleading the consumer. Whilst doing this, they'll of course hide the fact that they're using a Spreadtrum SoC.

To add insult to injury, they'll charge a high price for the phone.

When you check for specs, what you'll see is:

SoC - 1.2GHz Quad core Processor

The average consumers rushes to buy these devices and are sorely disappointed.

I had an old tab with a Spreadtrum SoC and it was a disaster.

In the end, the tab was a glorified television and pdf reader. That was all it was good for.

Most people who used Spreadtrum devices in the past, and later found out would have nothing to do with phones or tablets carrying Spreadtrum.

Lots of people, as soon as they hear Spreadtrum, oya, they'll take off both slippers, hold them in both hands and run.

This has contributed to the bad image that Unisoc have had over the years and still continues till today in the minds of many people.

Let's look at the SoCs that Unisoc has made over the years and let's see why they're that bad.

Let's start from 2014.

In 2014, Spreadtrum released almost 10 SoCs that year. These SoCs are all entry level with very similar specs.

The specs are:

core count: quad core
core type: Cortex A7
GPU: Mali 400 series
size: 28nm
ISA: ARMv7
clockspeed: 1.2 or 1.3GHz
memory: LPDDR2 or 3, and 3G capability.

The SoCs are:

1. SC5735A (Dexp Ursus NS370)

2. SC5735

3. SC7715 is a single core SoC (Samsung Galaxy Ace NXT and Samsung Galaxy Pocket 2)

4. SC7725 is a dual core SoC (Samsung Galaxy Z1, Samsung Galaxy J120H)

5. SC7730A (Lenovo A1900)

6. SC7730S (Samsung Galaxy Z3, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, Blu C4, Blu Advanced L4).

7. The most popular Spreadtrum SOC of that era was the SC7731C (Flare S series, Cherry Blu, MyPhone)

8. Rounding up this segment is the SC7731G (iTel vision, Huawei Y5C, Archos 40D).

These SoCs then flooded the market and were used in a number of cheap phones. They remained popular through 2015 and even competed favourable with Mediatek SoCs.

In 2016, they released a new batch of SoCs with similar specs to the ones from 2014.

The only difference was that the clockspeed was increased from 1.2GHz to 1.3/1.5GHz and these SoCs had 4G capability.

The SoCs are

1. SC9830A (Samsung Galaxy J1 mini prime and LYF Flame 7)

2. SC9830

3. SC9832A (Intex Aqua lineup, Micromax, Lenovo Z7).

In 2017, Tsinghua company started pushing Unisoc to challenge Mediatek and to set their sights higher.

Since ARM CPU cores were already dominating the market. Spreadtrum signed an unlikely agreement with tech giants Intel.

Unisoc acquired a Core license from Intel and made two SoCs.

They both had similar specs e.g 14nm, Octa core. the Intel X86-64 architecture and Intel Airmont processor cores.

The difference between them both was GPU and Clockspeed.

The SoCs are:

1. SC9851 (Leagoo T5C) used a Mali T820 GPU and ran at 1.8Ghz

2. SC9861GIA used a PowerVR GT7200 GPU and ran at 2.0GHz.

Both SoCs flopped in the market because they were not very compatible with the Android ecosystem.

After the disaster of the Intel SoCs, Unisoc went back to their old ways.

In 2018, they released 13 SoCs into the market. Some of them were popular while others were not.

To make matters worse, some of the specs used are worse than the SoCs from 2014.

1. SC8810 (Samsung Galaxy Young 2) is a single core 40nm SoC running at 1GHz with a memory of DDR1. The SoC was slower than a snail.

2. SC8825 (Lenovo A390t), which is a dual core 40nm SoC running at 1.2GHz.

The rest used the same 2014 specs and only changed the names.

They are:

1. SC7731E (Flare S series, Nokia C1, Cherry Mobile, Itel A36, Itel A56, Itel P36, Itel S15/S15 pro, Itel S16)

2. SC7735S (Samsung Galaxy Core 2, HTC Desire 700)

3. SC8735S

4. SC8830

5. SC8830A

6. SC8831G (Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 lite, Samsung Galaxy Tab E, Samsung Galaxy Grand Neo plus, Samsung Galaxy J1 Mini)

7. SC8835S.

8. The 4G SoCs like the SC9832E (Nokia C2, Samsung Galaxy J2 core, Meizu C9 Pro, Micro Spark Go, Itel A35)

9. SC9850 (Cherry mobile, Flare A+) also used those specs from 2014 as well.

That year however, Unisoc made two new SoCs based on ARMv8.1.

After years of using ARMv7 even when everyone else had upgraded, this was a welcome development for the company.

The size of the transistors were shrunk down from 28nm to 16nm. The new SoCs also used modern Cortex A53 and LPDDR4 memory. The last big change was the switch from quad core to octa core.

The two new SoCs are SC9860 and SC9860GV.

Surprisingly, they did not sell well as no company used them.

It was in this same year, 2018 that Spreadtrum were merged with RDA electronics and became UNISOC.

In 2019, the last SoCs that were branded with the Spreadtrum name were released.

They were budget SoCs with modern specs e.g ARMv8-A, Cortex A55 cores, PowerVR IMG8322 etc.

This was Unisoc's way of leaving the Entry level market behind.

1. SC9863 (Coolpad 3)

2. SC9863A (iTel Vision 1, Doogee N10, Teclast P10S, Teclast P20, Teclast P80x, Itel P36pro).

In late 2019, RDA's influence on the company was very clear.

The company made a new series of Midrange SoCs known as the Tiger T series

They boasted modern specs such as the 12nm size, ARMv8.2A, Cortex A75 and A55, LPDDR4 memory etc. They mostly shared similar specs and used a 2+6 big.LITTLE arrangement.

At last, Unisoc-spreadtrum had decided to join the modern world.

Three Tiger SoCs were released in 2019. They're:

1. Tiger T310 (Hisense F30S) with a PowerVR GT7200.

2. Tiger T618 (Teclast M40) with Mali G52 MP2

3. Tiger T710 with a PowerVR GM9446.

In 2020, the company announced their first 5G SoCs.

The Tiger T7510 (Hisense F50 5G) keeps most of the specs from 2019 while the Tiger T7520 is much more modern with 6nm process and Cortex A76 cores. It also uses a Mali G57 GPU.

Now, you cannot have 5G SoCs without a 5G modem. Unisoc have made their own 5G modem as well. It is called the Makalu IVY510 5G modem.

Unisoc is trying very hard to shake off it's bad reputation by investing heavily in research and development as well.

They have announced that their new SoCs will be able to carry out Virtual and Augmented reality tasks very soon.

The problem now is that a lot of companies who used to buy their cheap SoCs cannot afford the new Tiger line up, so they keep asking for the old Spreadtrum SoCs.

A good example is Itel.

Itel's latest brand flagship still uses the Unisoc SC9736A from 2019 in 2021.

So it may take a while for the public to accept Unisoc as one of the serious competitors in the industry.

Personally, I want Unisoc to make good SoCs. This should put pressure on the big boys such as Qualcomm and Mediatek and force them to reduce their prices.

Remember competition is always good for the customers.

So if you didn't know about Unisoc Spreadtrum SoCs.

Well now you do.

(Culled from my Telegram channel, can also be found on my Facebook page)

https://inquisitiveuniverse.com/2021/03/17/unisoc/ (Post link)

This's just an exposition on its own. Weldon op

Nice right up

DhatPeacefuldud:
Nice writeup boss, had to click those links and get enlightened on apple bionic, snapdragon and mtk processors..
Lol i'm patiently waiting for the article on exynos, kirin etc

I've added the Exynos link.

oscillation55:

This's just an exposition on its own. Weldon op

I try to be as detailed as possible. But people get short attention spans these days. so I'm considering shortening my articles.

atheistandproud:


I've added the Exynos link.

Bro I have a question. Those phones that phone reviewers use to review, do the phone company gift them the phones or do they collect them back after the review?

Cosmicstranger:
Nice write up

Thank you

The5DME:
Bro I have a question. Those phones that phone reviewers use to review, do the phone company gift them the phones or do they collect them back after the review?

Depends on the agreement between the company and the reviewer in question.

Sometimes they get to keep it

other times they may have to return it.

Some reviewers especially those that are up and coming have to buy their own review units.

thanks boss

The5DME:
No wonder my itel A56 pro dey heat up like mad. Even to play dream league na war. The way that phone dey heat up ehn, be like say ma break am. Anyway, I only bought it because I had no choice. I hate transsion. I hate transsion. I hate transsion.

I believe you'll have a choice and say in what you buy.

It's all about working on yourself instead of waiting for a miracle.

atheistandproud:


Depends on the agreement between the company and the reviewer in question.

Sometimes they get to keep it

other times they may have to return it.

Some reviewers especially those that are up and coming have to buy their own review units.

True this.

Oh and they have to write to them to request for the phone to be reviewed (unless they are "sponsored" or approached by the brand)

As for reviewers shilling a brand... Well either they sponsored or fanboys

KrazyDave16:

I believe you'll have a choice and say in what you buy.

It's all about working on yourself instead of waiting for a miracle.

it was due to paucity of funds bro. Na money issue make me buy that phone. If I had waited for sometime and saved more; I could've been rocking my redmi 7a but I couldn't wait.

The5DME:
it was due to paucity of funds bro. Na money issue make me buy that phone. If I had waited for sometime and saved more; I could've been rocking my redmi 7a but I couldn't wait.

I can relate.

atheistandproud:

I've added the Exynos link.

Okay bro, thanks

DhatPeacefuldud:
Okay bro, thanks

you're welcome. I'll add Kirin tomorrow morning.