Xiaomi’s in-house SoC rumors told us Surge S2 is on the road

Recent rumor says, Xiaomi is working on SoC (System on Chip), which will be custom-made, and the company may officially introduce this in the first half of 2025.acam claims, Xiaomi has teamed up with chipmaker UNISOC for this SoC development and manufacturing will be entrusted to TSMC via its N4P 4nm process, according to DigiTimes.

Such an SoC is thus speculated to sit between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to make it competitive in the premium segment.

Key Specifications of Xiaomi’s Custom SoC

• 1x Cortex-X3 (high-performance core)
• 3x Cortex-A715: A balanced performance core
• 4x Cortex-A510 (efficiency cores for lower power consumption)
• IMG CXT 48-1536: high-end GPU used in high-intensive graphical tasks on computer systems, including gaming and multimedia.

Indeed, this modem, developed in partnership with UNISOC, is expected to deliver competitive 5G connectivity in step with recent mobile network standards.

Prolate Xiaomi’s Strategy

Pushing for Independence The development of this SoC looks very much like a craving by Xiaomi to emulate Huawei, which has enjoyed heavy governmental support in its endeavor of making own hardware and dependency reduction on foreign suppliers. This is actually a serious step for Xiaomi towards enjoying similar subsidies and preferences from the Chinese government in earnest. We guess new chip is to be named Surge S2, in line with Xiaomi’s past effort of the Surge S1 SoC in a telephone called the Mi 5C, launched in the year 2017.

Since then, Xiaomi worked on and developed various chips usable for each function, such as a camera processor, power management IC, and charging solutions. However, this latest development is a pretty huge foray into the self-developed flagship chipset; it likely hints that Xiaomi plans to equip the Surge S2 on its upcoming new flagship device.

Development Process and Subsidiaries

There are rumors saying that the tapeout process of the new chip of Xiaomi has already begun. The subsidiary in charge is Xuanjie established by Xiaomi in 2021. Its head is Adam Zeng, ex-CEO of UNISOC, Senior Vice President of Xiaomi. Recently, Xiaomi injected more capital into Shanghai Xuanjie and even set up a branch called Beijing Xuanjie. This means Xiaomi will go all out in chip development.

The fact that it’s making its own Surge S2 SoC clearly hints at the ambition to join the league of tech giants like Apple and Huawei that design and manufacture their chips. If the rumors prove true, Xiaomi could offer devices with even greater control over performance, power efficiency, and software-hardware optimization. This in-house chipset development could further help Xiaomi break its dependencies on Qualcomm and MediaTek and eventually establish itself as an innovator and leader where technology matters related to smartphones.

Source