By Sama Marwan,
Beijing, China – Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun has announced via a post on the Chinese platform Weibo that the company has officially begun development of a new processor named XRING 01. The new chip is slated for an announcement this May, signaling Xiaomi’s strategic push towards greater self-reliance in the semiconductor sector. This move comes amidst rising concerns that Xiaomi might face U.S. sanctions similar to those previously imposed on Huawei, which severely limited its access to advanced chips and spurred its transition to local solutions.
To drive this ambitious project, Xiaomi has assembled a specialized engineering team of approximately 1,000 engineers. The project is being spearheaded by Chen Mu Yun, a former Qualcomm executive who joined Xiaomi in 2021. While XRING 01 isn’t Xiaomi’s first foray into chip design – they previously developed the Surge S1 chip in 2017 using 28nm manufacturing technology – XRING 01 represents a significant leap forward. It’s expected to be manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm technology, the same advanced process employed in the latest processors from Apple and Qualcomm.
According to technical leaks, the XRING 01 processor is anticipated to offer performance comparable to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (launched in 2021) or Gen 2 (from 2022) processors. The chip is rumored to feature a single main core clocked at 3.2 GHz, three performance cores at 2.5 GHz, and four efficiency cores at 2.0 GHz. Notably, it will rely on standard ARM cores, with Xiaomi not developing custom cores for this new processor.
This strategic direction indicates that Xiaomi is following a path similar to Huawei’s previous efforts to reduce reliance on American companies. This sets Xiaomi apart from rival Chinese companies like Oppo and Vivo, which continue to depend entirely on Qualcomm and MediaTek processors.
Current predictions suggest that the first smartphone to feature the new processor will be the Xiaomi 15s, an enhanced version of the recently launched Xiaomi 15 series. The new phone is likely to retain the same core design and specifications as previous iterations, with the only change being the replacement of the processor to feature the XRING 01.
It’s worth noting that the currently available Xiaomi 15 and 15 Ultra phones are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, making the Xiaomi 15s release a distinct experience in terms of architecture and performance.
