Not two weeks have passed since the presentation of Xiaomi home processor and the cell phone that first exploits it, the We are 5C, which already has news of its successor, currently called Surge S2.
Last month we talked to you this article of a mid-level variant and a top variant of the Pinecone SoC, respectively the V670 and V970 versions: same architecture but different performances. It would therefore seem that the Surge S2 is precisely the top version, for which new details have come out: the chip used will be a 16nm TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the largest and most independent semiconductor factory in the world) even if it will adopt, as already specified, the same octa-core architecture. It is also rumored that a sample of the Surge S2 has already been produced while its mass manufacture will begin in the third quarter of 2017. In the last quarter of this year we will have the first Xiaomi smartphone on which the S2 chip will be mounted.
As revealed in an interview with Lei Jun, Xiaomi CEO, the Pinecone chip was originally supposed to have top-of-the-range SoC components, such as the 10nm process employed by the current Snapdragon 835, but it has been set aside a bit for the low yield of the 10nm process, a bit for the limited funding: in fact the cost of a 10nm chip is very high, since it involves filling the cores in a wafer (Editor's note: yes, in the technical jargon of processing on chips and semiconductors, we speak of "pods") smaller and smaller.
Xiaomi's decision to employ a 16nm process although less efficient than a 10nm system is part of his choice to boost sales, trying to reduce production costs while still offering low-cost innovation.
