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Ambarella SOC manufacturer having serious issues
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Shares of Ambarella (NASDAQ:AMBA) fell nearly 30% over the past 12 months due to concerns about its slowing growth and soft demand from its action camera and drone markets. The bears also claim that Ambarella's niche of image processing SoCs didn't have an adequate moat against rival chipmakers.

    GoPro, DJI Innovations, and Hikvision -- respectively the largest action camera, drone, and security camera makers in the world -- all used Ambarella chipsets. But over the past few months, GoPro and DJI pivoted sharply from Ambarella chipsets, as did Google with its new Clips camera

    GoPro completely cut Ambarella out of the loop and hired Japanese chipmaker Socionext to create a custom GP1 SoC for its new Hero 6 cameras.

    DJI recently revealed that its portable Spark drone didn't use an Ambarella chipset. Drone uses the Myriad 2 VPU (visual processing unit) from Intel's Movidius. DJI previously used the Myriad 2 alongside an Ambarella chipset in its flagship Phantom 4, but the Spark uses the Myriad 2 for both computer vision and image processing tasks. That alarming shift could eventually render Ambarella's SoCs obsolete.

    Google also installed the Myriad 2 in its Clips camera, which automatically takes burst shots by learning and recognizing the faces in a user's life. The Myriad 2 processes those images in real time with Google's machine learning algorithms. Google previously installed Movidius chips in its Project Tango augmented reality tablets.

    Ambarella's heyday is over, and its niche technology could soon be rendered obsolete by bigger chipmakers like Intel and Qualcomm. GoPro's shift to custom chips tells us that Ambarella chips aren't competitively priced, and DJI's tighter relationship with Movidius indicates that stand-alone VPUs can replace image processing SoCs.

  • 4 Replies sorted by
  • EspenBEspenB

    Well,it must be down to pricing only as the Socionext GP1 chip does not seem to offer anything beyond the Ambarella H22 SOC. The 3D electronic image stabilizer in both stops at 4K30.

    Despite the marketing talk to differentiate the product from competitors which also used Ambarella SOCs I can't really find any features unique to the GP1.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @EspenB

    Most unique feature is that you no longer can just make easy copy :-)

  • EspenBEspenB

    Implement the Ambarella H22 SoC in your action cam and performance is the same or better. Regardless of how much GoPro touts the GP1 SoC.

    The crux of the matter is that GoPro needed a cheaper SoC to implement and then made the retail price of the Hero6 a whopping 52 per cent higher (based on current retail pricing in Norway). In Germany the difference is "only" 42 per cent. But there is simply no rationale behind this premium pricing.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Put in an Ambarella H22 SoC in your action cam and performance is the same or better. Regardless of how much GoPro touts the GP1 SoC

    Wrong.

    In the absence of GoPro and alikes who kink all small bugs you will have nightmare, not camera.
    This LSI are very complex, and if large vendors do not use them small ones can't do anything good usually, just not enough good developers to fix horrors.

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