On February 28, 2017, Xiaomi held the “My Heart Surging” press conference in Beijing, and officially released its independent core “Surge S1”.
After a lapse of four years, the Surge is going to return.
Yesterday, the official Weibo account of Xiaomi announced: “A small self-developed chip, with Xiaomi’s endless technological dreams, rushed to come. On March 29, my heart will be surging. ”
The Surge S1 uses an octa-core design and is based on a 28nm process. It contains four 2.2GHz A53 cores and four 1.4GHz A53 cores. The GPU is a quad-core Mali-T860. As it adds the image compression technology, we guess it will reduce the memory bandwidth. The first model of this chip was the Xiaomi Mi 5C.
Affected by this news, coupled with the positive rumors that Xiaomi and Great Wall built cars, the Hong Kong stock of Xiaomi Group surged nearly 8% in intraday trading. Before the deadline, the increase was 7.53% to 25.7 Hong Kong dollars, with a total market value of 677.7 billion Hong Kong dollars.
New Surge Chip May Be An ISP Chip
It is worth noting that Xiaomi’s launch of its own chip may not be a large-scale and SoC similar to the Kirin 9000 and the Snapdragon 888 in the traditional sense. We mean it should be the next step in Xiaomi’s development in chip industry. Those who are unaware, making chips takes too long and too much investment.
The Surge chip may be just an ISP chip, mainly for smartphone image processing. It is an important part of the phone lens and COMS, which determines the quality of smartphone photography.
Previously, Xiaomi officially stated that the Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro and Mi 11 Ultra will be the first to use the Samsung GN2 outsole camera, becoming a high-end model with the exclusive “largest sensor in the global smartphone market”, creating a camera turning point.
The Samsung GN2 was jointly developed by Xiaomi and Samsung. It took 18 months and the research and development cost was as high as 200 million yuan. This shows the ambition of the Xiaomi Mi 11 to dominate the photography field.
From this point of view, it is reasonable for the new Surge chip to focus on imaging. The blessing of the self-developed ISP chip should further enhance the imaging capabilities of the Mi 11 Ultra.
In fact, Xiaomi has published dozens of chip-related patents, including “an optical fingerprint recognition chip and electronic equipment”, “chip, circuit board and electronic equipment”, “fingerprint recognition chip, electronic equipment and key event reporting method”, etc.
Lei Jun said in a public speech on the 10th anniversary of the Xiaomi Group that the Xiaomi Industry Fund has invested in more than 70 semiconductor and intelligent manufacturing companies.