China's Xiaomi Develops First In-House Smartphone Processor in co-operation with ARM

By Peter Clarke, EETimes Europe
March 02, 2017

In an attempt to keep up with rivals such as Apple, Samsung and Huawei, Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi has developed its own application processor, the Surge S1.

The Surge S1 is a 64-bit octa-core Cortex-A53 design with a Mali-T860 GPU and is implemented in TSMC's 28nm HPC+ manufacturing process technology. The design is implemented in a big-little manner with four Cortex-A53s set to clock at up to 2.2GHz and four set to clock at up to 1.4GHz.

According to a diagram provided by Xiaomi the chip includes a baseband modem but it is not clear to what standard that complies, who it has been licensed from, or whether it has been internally developed. Companies such as Qualcomm and Intel are announcing upgrades to 4G-LTE modems and first passes at 5G modems, although there is as yet little infrastructure support in the first case and standards are not yet finalized in the second.

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