China’s Biggest Smartphone producer – Xiaomi is all set to unveil their own Processor ‘Pinecone’ on 28th February. We first heard the rumour of Xiaomi developing its own chip in mid-2015 when the vice president of the processor manufacturer Leadcore announced a partnership with Xiaomi to help it design them.
There are very few OEMs that produces their own SoC for their smartphones namely Huawei, Samsung and Apple. With the launch of new SoC Xiaomi will be the fourth player joining the league. SoC also is known as System-on-a-Chip includes different components like Radio receiver, GPU, USB controller, Power management circuits, Memory and so on. It will be a very complicated task for Xiaomi to do everything all right.
Note: The term Pinecone is translated directly from the Chinese term and not yet confirmed by Xiaomi.
There were also the rumours of Xiaomi testing their processor on their lower-priced models. The first possible use of chip was published on Chinese Social Media Weibo. According to previous leaks, the first device with the in-house chip is reportedly code-named Xiaomi Meri. With the launch of own SoC Xiaomi will be the second Chinese smartphone manufacturer only after Huawei to produce its own processing units.
It seems like this is very bad news for the two biggest SoC producer Qualcomm and Mediatek, they were providing chips for Xiaomi devices till now. Xiaomi nearly sold 10 Million devices only on Q4 2016 and we hope that Xiaomi will produce better SoC.
