Xiaomi Surge S1 Chipset Release Date, Specs News: Company's First In-House Processor Unveiled; To Power Mi 5c Smartphone

By Georgia Gana, Christian Post Contributor Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Xiaomi finally introduced its first in-house chipset, Surge S1. The Chinese electronics company now joins the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei as smartphone manufacturers that use their own processors.

According to Xiaomi, the Surge S1 aims to attain a balance between performance and power efficiency. It will enable devices to perform during high-performance scenarios but will still be efficient enough for daily use.

Surge S1 will be an octa-core 64-bit processor and will be equipped with four A53 cores at 2.2 GHz and four A53 cores at 1.4 GHz. It will be built using the 28 nm High-Performance Computing (HPC) process.

According to GSMArena, it will be a midrange chipset that will compete with the Huawei Kirin 650, Qualcomm Snapdragon 430, Samsung Exynos 7580 and the MediaTek MT6738T processors. Meanwhile, based on benchmarks released by Xiaomi, the Surge S1 will be comparable to the Snapdragon 625 and MediaTek P10 chipsets.

To handle gaming and graphics, the Surge S1 will be paired with the Mali-T860 quad-core graphics processing unit (GPU), said to be 40 percent more efficient than the previous-generation Mali-T760 graphics chip.

Other features include dual microphone voice reduction, HD calling and 14-bit dual Image Signal Processor (ISP).

Xiaomi also revealed that one benefit of using their own chipset is that that they will be able to release Android updates at a much faster pace. Specifically, the Android 7.1 Nougat update will be released sometime in March.

To demonstrate all that Xiaomi's in-house chipset has to offer, the Chinese electronics company announced that the newly introduced Mi 5c smartphone will be powered by the Surge S1. Notable features for the 5.15-inch smartphone include a Full HD display, 3 GB of random-access memory (RAM), 64 GB of built-in storage, a 12-megapixel (MP) rear camera, an 8-MP front shooter and a 2,860 mAh battery.

The Surge S1 chipset is expected to power upcoming smartphones from Xiaomi. More variants are also slated to be released down the line.