Xiaomi re-enters in-house chip game with deeper pockets, expect an unveil this Thursday

Banner showing off the Xring O1

Looks like Xiaomi is trying this whole in-house chip thing again, after that first attempt back in 2017. You might remember the Xiaomi Mi 5c, which housed its Surge S1 processor, an octa-core chip with a mix of Cortex-A53 cores and a Mali-T860 GPU, an experiment Xiaomi pretty much killed years later after reports of development hell with its successor, the Surge S2, which never saw the light of day.

According to a Weibo post on Monday by CEO Lei Jun, and reported by CNBC, the Chinese tech company is committing a whopping 50 billion yuan, that's about $6.9 billion, over the next decade starting from 2025 to develop its own silicon. Xiaomi is even hyping up an event this Thursday where it will unveil the Xring O1, a brand new system-on-chip. It is apparently built on a 3nm process, putting it in the same advanced league as Apple's A17 Pro chips found in the latest iPhone 15 Pro models.

Fueling the hype, some Geekbench scores surfaced for a device model "Xiaomi 25042PN24C" with a motherboard identifier "O1_asic," believed to be the Xring O1. These numbers point to a single-core score of 1860 and a potent multi-core score of 7449.

The details paint a picture of a ten-core ARMv8 CPU: two primary cores pushing 3.90 GHz, four performance cores at 3.40 GHz, another two at 1.89 GHz, and two efficiency cores at 1.80 GHz, all working alongside a hefty 15.21 GB of RAM.

Xring O1 alleged benchmarks

Until this point, Xiaomi has heavily relied on U.S. firm Qualcomm for the brains of its flagship smartphones, using the Snapdragon series. Qualcomm's CEO, Cristiano Amon, however, does not seem too fussed. He told CNBC on Monday:

We remain a strategic supplier of chips for Xiaomi, and most important, I think Qualcomm Snapdragon chips are used in the Xiaomi flagships and will continue to be used in the Xiaomi flagships.

Designing your own processors is a really expensive and difficult path, currently dominated by the likes of Google with its AI-focused Tensor chips which leverage custom TPUs, Apple with its powerhouse A-series Bionic processors known for tight hardware and software integration and strong Neural Engine performance, and Samsung with its Exynos line, though Samsung often juggles Exynos with Qualcomm chips depending on the market and model. Many other phone makers just buy off-the-shelf from Qualcomm or MediaTek because it is easier.