- May 18, 2007
- 23,836
- 5,285
- 108,890
2013's SoCs had CPUs around twice as fast as 2012's due to 50-70% higher clocks and architectural improvements, IGPs 4-6X as fast, many manufacturers doubled the amount of RAM and had a few other miscellaneous improvements; enough to make many people have upgrade itches.
2014's SoCs are almost doubling the CPU performance from 2013's models again, IGPs appear to be headed towards another 3-4X leap, manufacturers that did not jump to 2GB RAM in 2013 will likely jump to 2GB this year and those that had 2GB last year will jump to 3-4GB... so there are plenty of reasons to believe 2014 will be yet another fairly strong year for people updating phones, tablets and phablets again or for those who do not already own one to get their first.
2015 might slow down on the CPU side due to the "3GHz brick wall" but we will likely still get another 2-3X IGP improvement, 4-6GB LPDDR4, 3-4 channel memory controllers to accommodate the faster IGPs and that also leaves tons of room to raise the bar on entry-level device configurations. More of the same for 2016. Somewhere in there, we should also see the first sub-20nm SoCs with better power efficiency, broader adoption of more efficient OLED displays, migration to USB3.1 connectors, larger internal storage configurations and likely a handful of other little things.
So I expect at least another 2-3 years of strong phone/tablet/phablet sales before the market starts settling down due to most people interested in owning such devices already having devices powerful enough to cover everything they need.
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