Xiaomi’s first flagship phone chip is a genuine Snapdragon 8 Elite rival

Xiaomi has unveiled its first in-house flagship chipset, the Xring O1, and it’s got enough power to go head-to-head with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite. The company also unveiled a 15S Pro phone and Pad 7 Ultra tablet that the new chip will power, plus a new version of the Watch S4 powered by another Xiaomi chip.

The Xring O1 isn’t Xiaomi’s first phone chipset, but it’s the first since 2017’s midrange Surge S1, and is far more powerful than that. Developed using a second-generation 3nm process, this is a chip intended to rival the 8 Elite, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400, and Apple’s A18 series. On paper, it looks up to the task.

Xiaomi has opted for a 10-core CPU, more than any of the competition. Two Arm Cortex-X925 prime cores are clocked at 3.9GHz, with four more cores at 3.4GHz, two at 1.9GHz, and another two at 1.8GHz. The 16-core Immortalis-G925 is also top-spec, matching the graphics horsepower in MediaTek’s Dimensity flagship.

Chip architecture has started to vary enough between the major players that clock speeds and core counts aren’t a great guide to performance. Neither are lab benchmarks, though Xiaomi’s claimed AnTuTu score of over three million puts this up there with the best, and it’s bullish about the chip’s power-efficiency too.

What this tells us, though, is that Xiaomi is serious about the Xring O1 holding its own as a true flagship: it should be in the same ballpark as Android alternatives from Qualcomm and MediaTek, and far ahead of the most powerful chips from Samsung’s Exynos team. 

To hammer the point home, Xiaomi is launching the Xring O1 inside the 15S Pro, which is essentially a rerelease of last year’s 15 Pro, but with the Snapdragon 8 Elite swapped out for Xiaomi’s own chip. It also comes in a rather sleek carbon fiber design. It’s joined by the Pad 7 Ultra, also using the O1, a premium tablet with a 14-inch OLED screen and large 12,000mAh battery, that at 5.1mm is one of the thinnest tablets on the market.

It’s clear that Xiaomi’s ambitions go beyond a single chip, and even beyond phones and tablets. To emphasize that, it’s also launched the Xring T1, a flagship chipset designed for smartwatches. Details are light, but it includes a 4G modem, and Xiaomi has used it to power an eSIM version of the Watch S4.

All of this sounds like bad news for Qualcomm, which has long counted Xiaomi as a major customer. It’s often the first to announce a phone running the latest Qualcomm flagship each year, and as the third-biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world, Xiaomi is big business for Qualcomm. It will take some comfort in the fact that just this week the two companies signed a multi-year agreement for Xiaomi phones to keep using Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8-series chips, but there can’t be much doubt that Xiaomi’s long-term plan is to go it alone. After all, if Apple can, why can’t Xiaomi?