Xiaomi hints at new custom Surge chip for first time in years
- Xiaomi teased the arrival of a new custom chip next week.
- This would be Xiaomi’s first custom silicon since the Surge S1 SoC 2017.
Xiaomi is no stranger to custom chipsets as it released an internal smartphone SoC back in 2017. It’s been a few years, but it looks like the manufacturer may finally have new custom silicon wrapped up.
Xiaomi today published a teaser about Weibo, which specifically refers to a “self-developed chip” according to machine translation. However, the term “strong” or “strong” is mentioned in the teasers and posts of various Xiaomi executives.
For the uninitiated, the first and only commercially available custom smartphone chipset from the manufacturer was called Surge S1. So it sounds like we might expect a new surge chip then. But what should you expect from it?
The Surge S1 was a full chipset used in the 2017 budget Mi 5C. So you might think that a new surge chip would also be a full-fledged smartphone processor. However, developing a SoC is a complex, expensive, and time-consuming task. Even companies like Huawei took years and tons of releases to eventually deliver high-end processors. So in theory, it is possible that Xiaomi could develop a less ambitious piece of silicon that sits alongside a standard Snapdragon processor.
We’ve already seen Google follow a similar strategy with its Pixel Neural Core and Pixel Visual Core, promoting machine learning and image processing while sitting next to a flagship Qualcomm SoC. So a custom Xiaomi chip could provide a similarly focused boost, while a Snapdragon 800 series processor can do everything else.
We won’t have to wait long to find out what Xiaomi is offering as the official Weibo post confirms that we will learn more when the product launches on March 29th.
