We have been hearing about Xiaomi’s own home-grown processor tagged ‘Pinecone‘, which is expected to arrive in its Mi 5C smartphone, for a while now. According to a new report, there is a reason why Xiaomi, like Huawei, is now jumping on to the custom processor bandwagon and it does seem like Qualcomm is to blame.
The report comes from Taiwan’s DigiTimes, which hints that Xiaomi is working on a processor called the Pinecone V670 and that it will arrive in the Mi 5C smartphone to be launched somewhere in March.
The source of the news comes from the Economic Daily News and it states that Xiaomi will become the second vendor in China to develop and sell its own smartphone processors, after Huawei.
It turns out that everyone seems to have one common problem these days: Qualcomm. According to the report, the Chinese smartphone maker uses Qualcomm chips in its high-end Mi 5 smartphone, but production had to be cut short in the first quarter of 2016 thanks to a shortage of the 821 chips from Qualcomm’s end.
Leaked image of the Xiaomi Mi 5C Image: Anzhuo.cn
So as a first, Xiaomi building its own chipset will not see any chip shortages as it will not have to rely on Qualcomm for the same. The second advantage is to to do with another important market, India.
By using in-house chipsets, Xiaomi will be able to deliver better products with more variety in India. As of now, the company is only allowed to sell smartphones with Qualcomm chipsets due to patent issues, a good reason why the Redmi Note 4 with a deca-core MediaTek Helio X20 did not make it out here. Customers had to make do with the less powerful (but energy efficient) Qualcomm 625 chipsets instead.
Rumours also suggest that two models of the processor will be announced – Pinecone 1 with an octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU, and Pinecone 2 with four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. It is also said that it will be made on the 10nm process.
The whole “build your own processor” model begins to make more sense when you consider that none of the smartphones to be showcased at this year’s MWC in Barcelona will sport the latest Snapdragon 835 chipset.
Samsung at the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset announcement. Image: Reuters
Manufacturers like LG, which will showcase its new flagships without a flagship chipset, will have to make do with year old chipsets as Samsung has called dibs on the first batch of Snapdragon 835 chips from Qualcomm. Expect the first chipsets to arrive on the Galaxy S8 before showing up on any other smartphone. According to a previous report, Samsung being the manufacturer of this new chipset (using its collaborated 10nm process) has also given them exclusive rights to use the chips until the launch of the S8.
Expect a bevy of launches to happen from a number of manufacturers after this. Post this, you can expect a number of manufacturers to announce their own custom chipsets and and maybe give Qualcomm the boot when it comes to flagship smartphones.
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