Xiaomi Mi 5C Debuts With Company’s In-House Surge S1, Follows In Apple, Samsung’s Footsteps As Chip Maker

On Tuesday, Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi Inc unveiled its most aggressive plan yet: a new in-house designed chipset Surge S1, which will be used on its smartphones moving forward. The chipset debuted on the company’s highly-anticipated smartphone, the Mi 5c, Reuters reported. The company claimed that tests have showed its Surge S1 outperformed the widely used Snapdragon 625 by Qualcomm.

Xiaomi Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun said about the company’s decision in delving into chip-making, "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."

CNET said Xiaomi’s Surge S1 has certainly boosted its status as a serious phonemaker, and has joined the small but noteworthy group which includes market leaders Samsung and Apple and up-and-coming member Huawei.

Mi 5C, which goes up for sale in China on Friday for 1,499 yuan (USD218), is a quite impressive midrange smartphone with the Surge S1 chipset. Forbes said the chip has “four high-performance cores running at 2.2GHz and four low-performance cores running at 1.4 GHz to match the chip’s resources to the running app’s intensity, licenses the Mali T860 MP4 graphics processor to enable features like 4K video resolution, and light-sensitive images. It also comes with 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM plus 64GB of eMMC 5.0 storage, a front-facing fingerprint reader, dual-Nano SIM slots and China Mobile radio with VoLTE support on a smaller, 2,860 mAh battery, making the phone slimmer than Xiaomi’s midrange phone predecessors, Endgadget notes.