When we first heard of the Xiaomi Mi 5C last year, we were surprised at the choice of SoC it was going to have. It was not going to use a Qualcomm chip or one from Mediatek, neither was it going to sport Huawei’s Kirin processor or Samsung’s Exynos. Though we would still be surprised if it had used any of the last two. The Mi 5C was going to have a chip built by Xiaomi called Pinecone.

Pinecone is the result of a partnership formed in 2014 between Xiaomi-controlled Beijing Electronics Co. Ltd. and Leadcore Technology Ltd., a subsidiary of Datang Telecom. The partnership led to the formation of Beijing Pinecone Electronics Co. Ltd, a chip manufacturing company with Xiaomi owning 51% of the stake and Leadcore owning the remaining 49%. The new pinecone chip is actually not their first. It is said that the Leadcore L1860C in the Xiaomi Redmi 2A is the first chip from the company.

The Xiaomi Mi 5C will be the first device to launch with the new processor. Reports say there are two versions of the processor: one will be made up of 8 Cortex-A53 chips and will have a performance equal to Mediatek’s Helio P10 while the other called ‘Pinecone 2’ will be made up of 4 Cortex A73 chips and 4 Cortex A53 chips.

READ MORE: Unofficial Version of Android 7.1.1 for Xiaomi Mi Note, Mi 4 and Mi Note Pro Spotted

Xiaomi has already opened an official Weibo account  and website for Pinecone but you won’t find much info on the latter. The news of Xiaomi having its own processor is said to have affected Huawei who used to be the only Chinese manufacturer with its own line of processors.

The Xiaomi Mi 5C is expected to launch this month with a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 3GB of RAM and a 64GB of built-in storage. In  addition to the octa-core processor clocked at 2.2GHz, it is expected to have either a 12MP or 13MP rear camera and an 8MP front shooter. Pricing details are currently unknown.

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According to latest reports, Xiaomi is currently developing its own, independent processor. The company has already experimented with a Chinese chip maker for its super cheap Redmi 2A smartphone and taking account of its success, it is said that this Chinese startup is all set to release its first processor by early 2016.

The Redmi 2A which was launched back in April came with Leadcore’s LC1860C quad-core chipset. The performance of the chip was similar to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 but it costed the company way less. As a result, Xiaomi was able sell the device for only 499 Yuan! Naturally, this helped the company sell more than 5.1 million units of the device in the first three months alone.

It is said that Xiaomi wants to overcome the various drawbacks in its smartphones by launching its own chipset. The new Xiaomi processor will be used in low-end Redmi series phones. On the other hand, the high-end devices like the Xiaomi Mi 5 will continue to use Qualcomm’s flagship chipsets (Snapdragon 820?).

Xiaomi has also reportedly acquired the full range of ARM core licenses. Further, the company recently hired the former Qualcomm China President Wang Xiang, which should definitely help it achieve its goal.

Although the company is yet to announce anything officially, this could indeed turn out to be true. All major manufacturers are increasingly becoming independent when it comes to the use of processors. Samsung, Huawei, Apple are some of the company’s direct competitors who use their own chipsets inside their devices. Given that Xiaomi has a habit of making moves pretty quickly, this does seem possible.

Anyways, what do you think about such a move from Xiaomi? Is this best for the company to rely on its own processor for its low-end devices?

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