[MWC 2017] A week ago Xiaomi confirmed that they would be sharing details about its “Pinecone” processor at MWC, and sure enough they have. The company has officially announced the Surge S1 which is Xiaomi’s first in-house chipset that will be used to power the Xiaomi Mi 5c handset.
Xiaomi isn’t alone in launching their own designing their own chipset. For example Apple has their A-series of chipsets, Samsung has the Exynos lineup, and Huawei has the Kirin chipsets. The Surge S1 will feature an octa-core ARM Cortex A53 processor which will sport four 2.2GHz cores and four 1.4GHz cores, thus taking advantage of the big.LITTLE design.
It will also come with a Mali T-860 MP4 GPU which will support 4K videos, 32-bit DSP that will supporting VoLTE and 16kHz sampling to help provide high-quality audio and voice calls. According to Xiaomi chief executive Lei Jun, “The ability to create its own chipsets is the pinnacle achievement for any smartphone company.”
He adds, “For Xiaomi, the move is an essential next step in our development. In order to deliver on our promise to make innovation available to everyone, we need to master the core technologies of our industry and tightly integrate the development of our hardware with our software, helping us to make even better smartphones that will consistently surprise the industry and delight consumers.”