Smartphone manufacturers across the globe are engaged in the development of their own chips to be released from third party reliability and dependence. In a similar attempt, Chinese upstart Xiaomi today launched its own in-house chipset christened as ‘ Surge S1’. This advanced chip will first be integrated with their upcoming device, Mi 5c. With this move, the company joins the heavy list of top smartphone-chipmaker-brands such as Apple, Samsung, and Huawei.
Announcing the good news for Xiaomi fans, chief executive Lei Jun said,
The ability to create its own chipsets is the pinnacle achievement for any smartphone company. For Xiaomi, the move is an essential next step in our development. In order to deliver on our promise to make innovation available to everyone, we need to master the core technologies of our industry and tightly integrate the development of our hardware with our software, helping us to make even better smartphones that will consistently surprise the industry and delight consumers.
The chip is powered by an octa-core ARM Cortex A53 processor with four 2.2GHz cores and four 1.4GHz cores. Surge S1 also incorporates integrated Mali T-860 MP4 GPU that provides the chipset with excellent graphics performance which is required while gaming and streaming 4K videos. For offering high-quality audio and voice calls, the chip also includes 32-bit DSP supporting VoLTE and 16kHz sampling. As per Xiaomi, the said ingredients delivers a perfect balance between performance and power efficiency.
In addition to its smartphones, Xiaomi’s varied range of products including TVs, and routers, among others might also get the chip support. With this move, the company has dismissed the necessity to source chips from industry influencers such as Qualcomm or MediaTek. It says that developing a chipset was part of Xiaomi’s 10-year roadmap which the company established in 2014. The fresh achievement can be seen as the outcome of 28 months of hard work by company’s Pinecone subsidiary.
