Xiaomi just announced Surge S1, its first in-house SoC at an event in China, as it had promised. It is an Octa-Core SoC with four high-performance ARM Cortex A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and the other four power-efficient ARM Cortex A53 cores are clocked at 1.4GHz. It has big.LITTLE structure for efficient usage of the eight cores.
It is made using TSMC’s 28nm HPc process technology, has quad-core ARM Mali T860 GPU, 32-bit DSP for voice processing, support for VoLTE and more.
Xiaomi said that it took only 28 months for the processor from planning to large scale production and it is made by Xiaomi and Pinecone. “The design objectives are to balance performance and power efficiency and to produced in a large scale,” said the company.
Xiaomi says that it beats the 14nm Snapdragon 625 and both MediaTek Helio P10 as well as P20 in Geekbench 4.0 CPU multi-core benchmark and GFXBench Manhattan off-screen benchmark.
Highlights of Xiaomi Surge S1
- Octa-Core – Quad 2.2GHz A53 + Quad 1.4GHz A53 CPUs
- 28 nm HPc process
- Quad-Core Mali-T860 GPU
- 32-bit high-performance DSP for voice processing
- 14-bit dual ISP with Up to 36-megapixel camera support, Light sensitivity enhancement / dual noise reduction algorithm / Multi-shot optimization
- Dual channel LPDDR3 933MHz RAM, eMMC 5.0 Storage
- Network -LTE Cat.4 – 5 modes 23 bands; VoLTE high definition voice and video calls
- Audio Formats supported: PCM, AAC/AAC+/eAAC+, MP3, AMR – NB and WB, FLAC, APE, DSD, WAV SNR: 119dB / Total Harmonic Distortion: -90dB Supports SmartPA / Dirac
- Video Playback: Up to 4K@30fps; Capture: 4K @ 30fps,1080p@120fps,720p@240/fps;
- Codec support: H.265 /HEVC(Main profile), H.264 (Baseline/Main/High profile), MPEG4 (Simple profile/ASP), VC-1(Simple/Main/Advanced profile), and more
- Display: Supports device display up to 2560×1600 resolution
- Charging: 9V2A fast charging
- Dual noise reduction algorithm reduces noise and preserves details in low light
- Surge ISP algorithm improves camera light sensitivity by 150%.
- OTA upgradable baseband offers continuous performance improvements, continuous improvements for fraudulent base station detection
- Chip-level security protects data integrity and prevents unauthorized network access while combining hardware and software measures to offer enhanced security.
The Xiaomi Surge S1 will power the Xiaomi Mi 5c that is being introduced today at the event.
Commenting on its first in-house SoC, Lei Jun, CEO and co-founder of Xiaomi, said:
The ability to create its own chipsets is the pinnacle achievement for any smartphone company. For Xiaomi, the move is an essential next step in our development. In order to deliver on our promise to make innovation available to everyone, we need to master the core technologies of our industry and tightly integrate the development of our hardware with our software, helping us to make even better smartphones that will consistently surprise the industry and delight consumers.