Following rumors, Xiaomi today announced that it will launch its very own chip for smartphones later this month. The “XRING 01” is a chip that the company has apparently been working on for over 10 years now.
Details about the chip are scarce so far, but GizmoChina points to recent leaks that suggest the chip is built on a 4nm process through TSMC. The chip supposedly has a 1+3+4 layout and should lag just a bit behind Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 in terms of raw horsepower, sounding familiar to Google’s work with Tensor chips.
↫ Ben Schoon at 9To5Google
I like this. Having almost every Android device use Qualcomm’s chips is not good for fostering competition, and weakens Android OEMs’ bargaining position. If we have more successful SoC makers, consumers will not only gain access to a wider variety of chips that may better suit their needs, it will also force Qualcomm to lower its prices, compete better, or both. Everybody wins.
Well, except Qualcomm, I guess.
And people’s republic of han dynasty gets to introduce even lower levels of backdoors. Win-win-win. Yayyy!
Because america never conducted subversive operations… at this point i will take my chance with china to be honest.
So an in-house SoC but still using standard ARM Cortex cores fabbed by TSMC. Does this really isolate them from sanctions?
I have been expecting the China / US schism to drive the RISC-V market forward. Each of these “in-house” ARM chips takes some of the wind out of those sails.
ARM is a British company ultimately owned by Japan (Softbank). So not really covered by US sanctions.
ARM does a lot of their IP development in the US as well. Which the US government then uses to strong arm (pun intended) the sanctions.
Similar to how ASML is a Dutch headquartered company, but since a lot of their development and IP comes from their US-based centers, the US government prevented them from selling to China.
It is such a weird and convoluted ball of nonsense.
Well, the US is rushing to lose as much soft power as possible but US actions HAVE had a long reach. As a relevant example, in 2019 ARM stopped doing business with Huawei to stay onside with US policy.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18635326/huawei-arm-chip-designs-business-suspension
Earlier this year, the RISC-V ecosystem took a massive hit when the Milk-V OASIS was cancelled because TSMC refused to make the Sophgo SG2380. That is a Taiwanese company refusing to make a Chinese designed chip because of US policy. I do not live in the US and had a Milk-V OASIS reserved for over a year and then it got cancelled due to US policy. And this is just over the accusation of Sophgo violating US policy.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/28/tsmc_sophgo_huawei/
https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-with-sg2380-a-revolutionary-risc-v-desktop-experience/780
Interesting factoids found:
“Leaked” via code in January
https://www.notebookcheck.net/XRing-Upcoming-Xiaomi-in-house-SoC-spotted-again-slated-to-power-the-Xiaomi-15S-Pro-this-year.942883.0.html
Which refers back to their previous attempt in 2017
https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_displays_its_first_ever_inhouse_chipset__surge_s1-news-23696.php
With some details here
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-s-Surge-S1-SoC-could-find-possible-takers-in-the-upper-midrange-segment.232204.0.html
https://www.gsmarena.com/two_xiaomi_pinecone_chipsets_detailed_cortexa73_and_malig71_included-news-23560.php
So I guess the “ten years” in the making would account for those previous SoCs, too. And to be fair, I saw some reactions implying that’s a ridiculous amount of time for “just” slapping cores from other vendors (ARM Cortex cores + PowerVR)… But it’s not if/since it involves making the whole platform, and going through a few rounds of development, then producing the intended design, which also takes a couple of years.
It would be interesting to find a write-up about how bespoke they truly are. And also a write-up about their “secure”[sic] boot chain. For example, how the root of trust exists, and how the vendor software stack during early startup is configured to allow (or disallow) user-controlled code to run.