Building upon rumors about the launch of their in-house developed ‘Pinecone’ mobile processors, Xiaomi has today finally confirmed the development via their official Weibo account. Since the Chinese hardware upstart has no plans of attending MWC next week, it has today posted an invitation for the unveiling of their first mobile chipset in Beijing.
The invitation posted on Weibo says that the event will be hosted on February 28 at the Beijing National Convention Centre, China. It was previously being reported that the said in-house developed chips will be launched within a month. But, the launch now coinciding with MWC 2017 doesn’t come as much of a surprise — but it surely adds to the already existing hype.
Over the last couple of years, Xiaomi (also known as Apple of China) has been extensively covering ground under its global expansion plan. But, the company has recently accepted that it has grown way too fast and needs to get a grip on their business operations. Thus, the unveiling of another new phone at MWC was out of the question.
But, the Chinese giant is now looking to cement its position in the smartphone ecosystem with the release of its own chips. These will be developed by Beijing Pinecone Electronics, a company closely associated and controlled by Xiaomi. This semiconductor company is a joint venture between Xiaomi and chipset maker Leadcore, which started off back in 2014. This means the company has their 200 to 300 member strong team working on the development of its chips for the last two years.
Though the Chinese giant hasn’t provided much info about the chipsets in the invitation but the rumor mill suggests that there will be two octa-core SoC variants, namely V670 and V970. The V670 is said to use four Cortex A-53 large cores and four Cortex A-53 small cores along with Mali-T860 MP4 GPU clocked at 800 Mhz. It is also said to be using the 28 nm manufacturing process to build these chips, which arrive this quarter.
The V970, on the other hand, has an octa-core infrastructure comprising of four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. These cores will enable the chip to have a minimum and maximum clock speed of 2.0 GHz and 2.7 GHz respectively. It will be the high-end chip that comes equipped with the better Mali G71 MP12 GPU clocked at 900 Ghz. It will use the 10 nm manufacturing process and is expected to be launched in Q4 this year.
As for the first smartphone to come packed with Xiaomi’s Pinecone processor, the interwebs are buzzing with rumors of it being the Xiaomi Mi 5C. The said smartphone has already leaked on Geekbench and we have a basic view of the hardware and software spec of the smartphone.
It is expected to host a 5.5-inch narrow-bezel display and release in two variants — one with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and other with their in-house Pinecone chips. It will also pack 3 GB of RAM, 64 GB of internal storage, 3200 mAh battery, and 12MP/8MP rear plus front camera setup. Though the image attached above shows that it will be running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow but Xiaomi is already working on Android 7.0 Nougat-powered MIUI 9. So, the Mi 5C is expected to come with powered by the same at an asking price of 1,499 yuan.
