Xiaomi is making another move toward controlling more of the silicon inside its smartphones. According to a new report from China, the company has established a dedicated chip platform department within its mobile phone product division.
The team will be led by Qin Muyun, a former Qualcomm senior director, who will directly report to Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of Xiaomi.
Xiaomi ventured into chip design with its in-house Pengpai S1 SoC back in 2017. It was an 8-core 64-bit processor based on a 28nm process. The chip debuted in the Xiaomi 5C, but the phone failed to gain traction, and the S1 line quietly disappeared from the spotlight.
Despite the initial stumble, Xiaomi is continuing its journey of smaller, specialized chips. In the past few years, the company has rolled out several self-developed components catering to various aspects of a phone.
For instance, its Pengpai C series is designed for imaging, the P series for fast charging, the G series for power management, the T series for signal enhancement, and the D series for display control.
These chips haven’t replaced core processors but have helped Xiaomi gradually build expertise across the hardware stack. Now it seems like the company has the confidence to build its full-stack smartphone SoC.
Xiaomi’s first mobile processor will deliver flagship-grade performance
Thanks to a report earlier this month, we might even know what Xiaomi’s first in-house smartphone processor might bring to the table.
The chip is expected to utilize an octa-core CPU configuration leveraging ARM cores. This includes one Cortex X925 core at 3.2GHz, three Cortex A725 cores at 2.6GHz, and four Cortex A520 cores at 2.0GHz.
The prime core is the same MediaTek uses in its latest Dimensity 9400 while the high-performance and efficiency cores are from a generation back. So while Xiaomi’s configuration might not compete directly with the latest flagship processors, it might offer solid performance for a sub-flagship phone.
The GPU side could be more competitive. The chip reportedly integrates an Imagination Technologies IMG DXT72 GPU at 1.3GHz, which early estimates claim may outperform the Adreno 740 in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
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