United States won’t be happy, Xiaomi has developed a chip so powerful that even China has praised it.

Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi this week unveiled its first high-end processor, the Xring 01, a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that clearly aims to rival the industry benchmarks of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 and Apple’s A18 Pro. The result is such that the Chinese government itself has publicly hailed the performance.

The fruit of four years’ massive investment

Unveiled at a dedicated event, the Xring 01 embodies Xiaomi’s titanic effort to become a major player in the semiconductor industry. According to Lei Jun, the company’s founder and CEO, this processor is the fruit of four years’ development, involving more than 2,500 engineers and a budget of 13.5 billion yuan (€1.67 billion). And this is just the beginning: Xiaomi plans to invest a further €6 billion over the next decade.

The Xring 01 is no mere experiment. The “01” suffix hints at the launch of a new family of in-house processors. This model already powers the manufacturer’s new top-of-the-range products: the Xiaomi 15S Pro and the Xiaomi Pad 7 Ultra.

A powerful and efficient architecture

Manufactured by the Taiwanese foundry TSMC using 3nm etching, the same as Apple’s, the Xring 01 is based on a licensed ARM architecture and features an original configuration with ten cores divided into four groups (clusters):

• 2 Cortex-X925 cores clocked at 3.9 GHz for power peaks
• 4 Cortex-A725 cores at 3.4 GHz for intensive tasks
• 2 further A725 cores at 1.9 GHz for medium loads
• 2 Cortex-A520 cores at 1.8 GHz for energy savings

This design aims to optimise both performance and power consumption, while ensuring smooth transitions between different tasks. In initial benchmarks, the Xring 01 performed as well as or better than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, and better than Apple’s A18 Pro.

While these figures should be taken with caution, they do show a spectacular technological leap forward for Xiaomi, whose last attempt at an in-house processor – the Surge S1 in 2017 – was in a completely different league.

A geopolitical as well as a technical breakthrough

Xiaomi’s breakthrough comes at a time of tension between China and the United States over technological sovereignty. Huawei, another Chinese giant, had also developed high-performance SoCs before being sanctioned by the American authorities, who blocked its access to TSMC. Forced to do so, Huawei turned to SMIC, a local foundry… but still unable to compete with TSMC on fine etchings (below 7nm).

For the time being, Xiaomi is continuing to produce its chips via TSMC, but the question of a possible US embargo has arisen. The company already has a plan B, anticipating a repeat of the scenario experienced by Huawei.

With the Xring 01, Xiaomi is not only confirming its ability to design a premium chip worthy of the best global standards, but is also contributing to China’s rise to prominence in the semiconductor industry. All that’s missing now is complete manufacturing autonomy to close the loop. China is no longer content to follow, it is now leading the race. And Xiaomi, by getting ahead of the game, is establishing itself as one of its spearheads.