Xiaomi has decided the custom silicon game needs more yuan, patience and an expensive chip habit.
According to Reuters, the XRING 01 proves Xiaomi can make a mark in smartphone silicon, even if Qualcomm and MediaTek are not trembling into their spreadsheets yet. To keep its seat at the table, the Chinese manufacturer plans to invest 200bn yuan, about €25.3bn, in core technology research and development over the next five years.
Not all that cash will go into future system-on-chips, but Xiaomi only needs a few billion to make the point. The company has shipped one million XRING 01 units, which is tiny compared with the volumes of Qualcomm and MediaTek.
For the past five years, Xiaomi has invested 105.5bn yuan, about €13.4bn, in automobiles, custom silicon, foundational LLMs, major home appliances and other pet projects. That near €13.4bn spend has helped pull in $64.02bn in revenue, which gives Xiaomi a reason to keep shovelling money into the furnace.
Xiaomi is expected to invest 200bn yuan during the next five years, and the upcoming XRING 03 should be one of the fruits of that spend.
Xiaomi Group president Lu Weibing said the next-generation custom silicon will launch later this year. Previous reports suggest Xiaomi will not jump to TSMC’s shiny 2nm process and will stick with the older 3nm N3P node.
That means it may lose the process technology bragging contest, but Xiaomi has little reason to chase every expensive foundry bauble.
Given its current shipment volume, using the newest lithography would make limited sense. Development, design, prototyping, tape-out and mass production would cost Xiaomi millions before XRING 03 phones reached the market.
The waiting game is long, but Xiaomi seems prepared to play it rather than sprint into a cash bonfire. To keep costs down, the XRING 03 will probably use Arm CPU and GPU designs.
That could still be the start of something more interesting than another slab of Android spec-sheet shouting. After moving to 2nm, Xiaomi could start developing custom CPU cores, as Qualcomm has done with its Oryon series.
That is not expected for several years, because in-house cores are tricky, costly and not something cooked up in a PowerPoint by lunchtime. The point is to start somewhere, and several XRING generations could give Xiaomi a custom chipset ecosystem rather than another dependency chain.
