Another Heavyweight Will Launch Its Own Custom Smartphone Chip Later This Month

We’ve heard rumors since last year that Xiaomi is working on a custom smartphone chipset. Now, the company has made it official and confirmed that this new processor is on the way.

Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun announced on Weibo that the company’s new custom smartphone chipset is called the XRING 01. The executive added that this processor will debut in late May. Check out the machine-translated post below.

There’s no official word on specs just yet, but leaker Yogesh Brar previously claimed that the processor would be on par with 2022’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. He also asserted at the time that the chip would be made on TSMC’s 4nm process and would have a Unisoc 5G modem.

We’ve previously heard murmurings that this custom chip could debut in a phone called the Xiaomi 15s Pro, but we’ll just have to wait until later this month to see what this first phone looks like.

This isn’t Xiaomi’s first custom smartphone processor, though. The company launched the Surge S1 back in 2017, powering the Xiaomi Mi 5C. The Surge S2 was in the works before the manufacturer pulled the plug on its custom SoC project. But Xiaomi kept itself busy in the interim by producing custom chips for power management, imaging, and more. So we’re keen to see whether the company’s latest attempt at custom SoC development is a more successful endeavor.

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