Xiaomi unveiled three new in-house Xring processors on Monday, marking a step forward in the company's strategy to design its own silicon rather than rely exclusively on suppliers like Qualcomm and MediaTek.
The primary release is the Xring O3, a 3nm mobile phone processor manufactured by TSMC. According to Xiaomi, the chip achieved 5,228,014 points on AnTuTu benchmarks, representing the first time a mobile system-on-chip has surpassed the five-million mark. The company reported that the 10-core CPU delivers a 60 percent performance improvement over its predecessor, while the 16-core GPU provides an 85 percent increase in graphics performance alongside a 64 percent gain in power efficiency. Additionally, the O3 supports LPDDR6 memory with speeds up to 113.8 GB/s and offers 200 TOPS of tensor performance for artificial intelligence tasks.
Developed over 459 days, the Xring O3 is scheduled to ship in September in the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Pad 9 Pro Max in China. Xiaomi targets between 200,000 and 300,000 units for the new foldable phone.
Alongside the O3, Xiaomi introduced two additional processors. The Xring O100 is a 6nm AI accelerator designed to stack the processor and memory together to achieve 1.22 TB/s of bandwidth, aimed at running AI models inside phones, cars, and robots with commercial use slated for 2027. The third chip, the Xring D100, is a 3nm smart-driving processor featuring a 20-core CPU and a 16-core NPU intended for self-driving cars, with validation complete and a vehicle release expected in 2027.
Xiaomi restarted its chip development initiative in 2021, investing more than 21 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) and building a team of nearly 3,000 engineers. While the majority of Xiaomi's smartphones will continue to utilize processors from Qualcomm and MediaTek, developing proprietary silicon provides the company with greater leverage in supplier negotiations. Other Chinese automakers, including Nio, Li Auto, Xpeng, and BYD, also utilize in-house driving silicon.
