Having to concern itself with the possibility of U.S. sanctions like the one that prevents Huawei from obtaining cutting-edge chips, Xiaomi has created an independent 1,000-person team. This team is led by former Qualcomm senior director Qin Muyun, who has been with Xiaomi since 2021. The XRING 01, as it is called, is an application processor (AP) first spotted in March as a prototype and is expected to launch this month.
The Xiaomi division responsible for the homegrown chipset is not a new one. The division analyzes application processors and other chips being considered for use in Xiaomi phones. The development of its own independent smartphone chips aligns Xiaomi with fellow country-mate Huawei but does differentiate the company from other Chinese rivals. Phone manufacturers headquartered in the country such as Oppo and vivo use chips purchased from Qualcomm and MediaTek.
The XRING 01 isn’t Xiaomi’s first homegrown chip. In 2017, the Surge S1 was built using a 28nm process node (!). The chip featured four 2.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores and four 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 cores. Also included was the Mali T-860 MP4 GPU.
Xiaomi confirmed today that the homegrown XRING 01 application processor will be unveiled later this month. | Image credit-Notebookcheck.net
The latest rumors about the XRING 01 call for the chip to be built by the world’s leading foundry, TSMC, using its 4nm process node. The AP is believed to offer similar performance as 2021’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or 2022’s Gen 2. It will supposedly carry standard Arm cores and won’t feature custom cores created by Xiaomi. It will use a 1+3+4 configuration which will include a Prime core running at a clock speed of up to 3.2 GHz. Three Performance cores will be clocked at 2.5 GHz, and four Efficiency cores will run as fast as 2 GHz.
The Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi 15 Ultra are both equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipsets.
