Surprise! The 5 most popular phones are powered by neither Snapdragon, nor MediaTek
If you read tech blogs, you would be left with the impression that Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipsets, and the up-and-coming MediaTek processors are ubiquitous in the smartphone world, while handsets without one of those in, are outliers.
Research firm Strategy Analytics ran its thorough analysis of the mobile phone industry for the last quarter, and amongst all the market share movers and shakers is tucked this bombshell - none of the top 5 most popular phones in Q2 is powered by these two omnipresent chipset families.
It's an interesting statistics, but hardly surprising, though - out of the five most popular smartphones by model we have two made by Samsung, and two by Apple, as well as one by Huawei, and these companies all have their own custom chipset lines to rely on. Samsung eschewed the overheating Snapdragon 810 for the homegrown Exynos 7420 in the Galaxy S6, and never looked back. Apple has its custom AX line, and both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are outfitted with the A8 edition, while Huawei uses a Kirin CPU portfolio of its own making, too.
Bummer for Qualcomm and MediaTek, but there are still hundreds of handsets that are using their silicon, so they shouldn't be shedding tears over the drawing board. Hear, hear.
Source: StrategyAnalytics (paywall)
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