The controversy between Huawei and the US government has opened up scenarios in which Chinese companies have to work hard and become independent of stocks from the U.S. Companies like Huawei in part have already had the strength in the past to adopt internal chips to their own devices of internal origin to the same company, but the current situation has also awakened the possibility of other companies to make the generational leap about the mass production of their chipset.
Among these we find Xiaomi, which in the past has tried or perhaps it is better to say experienced, this road with its own Xiaomi Surge S1 SoC integrated within the forgotten Mi 5C. The success for this CPU never came and in part the development of a new generation was abandoned. In reality Xiaomi has simply taken the time to better study the issue and above all to invest in the right way in research and development. In mid-2019, in fact, Lei Jun's company became one of the largest shareholders of VeriSilicon, a company specialized in processor and chip development in general, up to the present day, in which Xiaomi became the third largest shareholder of Beijing Angrui Microelectronics Technolgy Co., further company specialized in the development of processors.
Xiaomi's new investments focus on the launch of the second proprietary processor
But that's not all, because Xiaomi's finances have concentrated for a value of 310 million yuan (about 40 million euros) also in Onray Microelectronics and Suzhou Suton Semiconductor Technology Co., two other companies specialized in the same technology sector. It is clear therefore that Xiaomi is still developing its own idea of processor even if it does not belong to the high segment of the market and performance range.
In fact, the latest rumors about the successor of the Xiaomi Surge S1 indicate a SoC developed with a 16 nanometer octa-core structure. In particular, 4 Cortex A73 cores and clocked at 2.2 Ghz and 4 Cortex A53 cores and clocked at 1.8 Ghz alongside a Mali G71MP8 GPU with support for UFS 2.1 memories and LPDDR4X RAM. It almost seems like a solution derived from MediaTek processors rather than Qualcomm, a solution that may not appeal to many fans related to the Chinese brand.
