GoKawiilFirst look: Xiaomi has introduced a new mobile processor for its premium devices, expanding efforts to develop technology that powers its smartphones. The Xring O3 is Xiaomi's latest system-on-chip and its most significant push yet into high-end smartphone silicon.
Built on a 3-nanometer process, the chip is designed for flagship devices, with a focus on AI workloads, graphics performance, and camera processing. The manufacturing technology puts Xiaomi closer to Apple's latest A19 Pro chips and ahead of Huawei's current in-house smartphone processors.
Xiaomi said the Xring O3 posted an AnTuTu score of 5.22 million, making it the first flagship mobile chip to exceed 5 million on the benchmark. Its CPU has 10 cores, all of which are large cores, and achieved a multi-core score of more than 15,000. The company said this represents a 60% improvement over its previous chip.
The processor includes Xiaomi's new G2-Ultra NX graphics unit. Xiaomi said the GPU improves performance by 85% while reducing power consumption by 64%. The Xring O3 also supports LPDDR6 memory with bandwidth of 113.8 GB/s, which Xiaomi said is 48% higher than that of the Xring O1.
AI processing is a core part of the chip's design. Xiaomi rebuilt its neural processing unit for MiMo, its platform for running large models on devices. The company said the NPU delivers 200 TOPS of tensor computing and 3.13 TFLOPS of vector computing, resulting in a 45% increase in edge AI performance.
The AI hardware is not limited to the NPU. Xiaomi added two SME2 acceleration units to the CPU and eight NX neural-network accelerators to the GPU. It also integrated AI processing into the image signal processor, display processor, and audio digital signal processor.
The additional hardware is intended to support features including image enhancement, frame interpolation, and noise reduction in low-light video. Xiaomi said the chip's unified fusion-bus architecture and metal-trace design reduce static latency to 82 nanoseconds.
Reuters reported that TSMC is producing the Xring O3. That gives Xiaomi access to one of the world's most advanced contract chipmakers as it works to expand its processor efforts beyond a limited internal research project.
For Xiaomi, the initiative is about more than benchmark performance. Qualcomm and MediaTek have supplied processors for Xiaomi phones for years, and both will remain major suppliers. However, an internally designed flagship chip gives Xiaomi more control over its product roadmap and could strengthen its negotiating position with outside vendors.
Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Steven Tseng and Rebecca Wang said Xiaomi is likely to produce the Xring O3 in limited volumes, leaving the company dependent on Qualcomm and MediaTek for much of its smartphone lineup.
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