Global AP market revenue 2019-2025

The application processor (AP) market worldwide generated revenues of 34 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. In 2020, a reduction in demand coupled with supply chain challenges, both exaggerated by impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, will result in a nine percent reduction to the global market, falling to 31 billion U.S. dollars.

System-on-a-chip (SoC)

The global AP market is forecast to experience strong growth in the coming years, with APs helping to drive innovation in smartphones as well as the next generation of high-tech, IoT devices. In such hardware, a mobile AP is typically a system-on-a-chip (SoC), designed to support applications running in a mobile operating system (OS) environment. The SoC combines multiple computer components onto one chip, or integrated circuit (IC), using less power and taking up less space in the process, hence their popularity within modern-day smartphones. Examples include the Apple A13 Bionic chip, found in the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, designed by Apple using Arm’s processor architecture.

Arm processor architecture

Arm, also recognized in the industry as ARM, is a semiconductor and software design company with its global HQ in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. The company, which was acquired by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group in 2016, is best known for its computer processor architecture. Arm develops the architecture and licenses it to other companies, who then use the design to create microcontrollers (MCUs), central processing units (CPUs), and SoCs. In addition to their smartphones, in 2020, Apple announced it will begin using Arm-based CPUs across its line of Mac PCs, a move away from their current partnership with Intel. The decision was made in order to standardize on one CPU architecture for all iPhone, iPad, and Mac products, with the transition to Apple's custom Arm-based chips expected to take place over a two-year period.