Huawei is one of the three smartphone brands in the world that makes its own chipsets, apart from Apple and Samsung. However, with the new sanctions on the company by the United States, Huawei CEO recently revealed that it will stop making flagship Kirin chipsets.

Xiaomi, another Chinese smartphone maker tried making its own chipset — Surge S1 which was launched in 2017. Years after its launch, there’s no follow-up from the company in this segment and we have seen only one smartphone being powered by Surge S1.

This led to many people think that the company has given up on its own chipset plans. However, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has confirmed that the company has not given up on its Surge chipset plan and added that he will not disappoint everyone’s expectations.

It remains to be seen what exactly is the company planning in terms of its second smartphone chipset and when it will get launched. Given that Huawei is out of the flagship chipset market, at least for the time being, Xiaomi seems to be in a good position to boost its chipset dreams and could rely on domestic players for this.

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The Xiaomi Surge S1 was an octa-core chipset that packed four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.4GHz. It was built on a 28nm HPC+ process and used ARM Mali-T860 as GPU.

It had 32-bit DSP support, VoLTE, 14-bit dual ISP with support for dual noise optimized night picture improvement. The chipset also included Xiaomi’s own chip-level security that’s upgradeable via OTA, having mechanisms to prevent data leakage.

Soon after the launch of the Surge S1 chipset, Xiaomi had launched the Mi 5C smartphone, making it the only smartphone in the world to come powered by the Surge S1 SoC. Nokia had reportedly partnered with Xiaomi to use the same chipset, but the brand has not launched any devices that use the Surge series of chipsets.

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Remember Xiaomi’s first-ever self-developed processor, the Surge S1? The chip made headlines back in 2017 as it pushed the Chinese smartphone maker into the elite group of tech companies like Samsung and Huawei that could develop their own chipsets. However, after the Surge S1, we didn’t hear much about its chip development progress. The latest information from China suggests that Xiaomi has likely abandoned its chipset project.

According to an industry insider, Xiaomi is focusing its attention on other projects which are not as complicated or expensive as developing an application processor. Instead of making smartphone processors, the company is looking to develop low power Bluetooth, RF chips, and other peripheral components. He notes that this would be different from Huawei’s strategy of completely investing in its chipset business.

He further adds that Xiaomi seems to be looking for a balance between developing a competitive product and financial profit. In this regard, it is diversifying its chip business to avoid the long-term costs of research and development.

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Over the past couple of years, Xiaomi has heavily invested in a number of chip companies. Just last week, it acquired a stake in Hypower Electronics, a fast-charging chip maker. Earlier this year, Xiaomi made strategic investments in two chipset manufacturers. Last year, Xiaomi had also invested in a chip designing firm, Verisilicon.

Even before this comment from the industry insider, there were reports about Xiaomi abandoning its smartphone processor project and converting this department into an employee-owned company with shares in Xiaomi. So after considering this new information, it looks like Xiaomi has indeed given up on its self-developed chipset ambitions.

The company’s first processor, the Surge S1, received a lukewarm response. But the Surge S2 was expected to be the real star of its processor lineup featuring four Cortex-A73 powered performance cores. This would have made for an upper mid-range chip back in 2018. However, a Xiaomi executive revealed that the company had faced unexpected hurdles in its development project. At the start of 2019, he assured that the team was still working on the new chip.

But it looks like the company’s second Surge chipset may never make it to the market. Designing a smartphone chipset is an extremely complicated process, engulfed with a lot of challenges. Even the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, Samsung, with years of experience in this industry, is still unable to match Qualcomm chips in terms of efficiency.

Notably, Xiaomi has not made any official announcement regarding its chipset development since 2018.

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