Custom 5G chipsets are being developed by Xiaomi and Oppo. According to a Digitimes article, the two Chinese firms intend to launch their own sub-6GHz 5G chip in late 2021 or early 2022.
Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two largest mobile chip manufacturers in the world, will compete with Xiaomi and Oppo.
According to reports, Unisoc, like Xiaomi and Oppo, is entering the race with its own 5G chip. On the new 5G chip production by Chinese smartphone brands, Digitimes cited industry sources in Taiwan. There isn’t anything else known about Xiaomi, Oppo, and Unisoc’s custom chips. Both, Xiaomi and Oppo may be releasing 5G chips soon. This will also reduce the two companies’ reliance on Qualcomm and MediaTek as chipmakers.
The announcement comes after Xiaomi teased a new chip ahead of the Mi 11 Ultra’s launch. It’s an in-house imaging processor, not a handheld processor.
It’s also the first one it’s made since Surge S1, the first in-house chipset, debuted in 2017. The Surge S1 has eight Cortex-A53 processing cores, four of which are clocked at 2.2GHz and four of which are clocked at 1.4GHz. The ThSurge S1 is powered by a quad-core processor and the graphics processor in the Surge S1 is a quad-core Mali-T860.
Xiaomi and Oppo are developing their own 5G chips that could help them prepare for a situation similar to Huawei’s due to US restrictions. Due to restrictions imposed by the US government, Huawei had to avoid designing its custom Kirin chipsets from TSMC. This news also comes as China continues to grow its semiconductor industry to become less reliant on foreign firms.