Xiaomi could be following the path of Huawei and Samsung

Aug 4, 2015 13:10 GMT  ·  By

There’s a trend in today’s mobile market: device manufacturers are no longer producing mobile devices only, but they are also taking up the production of chips fueling their phones and tablets.

Samsung is doing it, and so is Huawei. LG tried it too at some point, although not all that successfully, but soon we could see more mobile players join the chipset race.

A new report coming out of Chinese website CNBeta (via Gizmo China) claims that Xiaomi might be looking to start developing its own in-house processors, which might make it to the market as early as 2016.

Xiaomi collaborated with Leadcore for its super-budget smartphone Redmi 2A, which launched on the market in April, and since the handset proved quite popular with consumers, the device maker apparently got encouraged.

The Leadcore LC1860C quad-core chipset inside the phone delivers a performance similar to the Snapdragon 410, but because Xiaomi didn’t use a Qualcomm chip, it was able to sell the Redmi 2A for a super affordable price tag. Which in turn translated into massive sales.

Xiaomi will start to tackle silicon production with low-end chip

The report says that, for starters, Xiaomi plans to use its silicone pieces for its low-end Redmi series phones. Naturally, it will take the Chinese device maker a while before it can use its home-grown chipsets for flagship devices, like Samsung did with the Galaxy S6.

Xiaomi’s upcoming Mi5 Pro is expected to be the first smartphone to make it out into the wild with a Snapdragon 820 chipset under the hood that takes advantage of Qualcomm’s own Kyro custom cores.

We’re also told that the device maker has purchased an entire range of ARM core licenses. On top of that, the company has hired Qualcomm’s former China President Wang Xiang, so we expect great things to come out of the Chinese device maker in the silicon department.

The company hasn’t said anything official, but if the information turns out to be true, things would certainly take an interesting turn. It appears that more and more device makers are trying to gain independence from their chip suppliers.

Samsung, for example, was spared of the Snapdragon 810’s woes when it chose to use the Exynos 7420 for its Galaxy S6 flagship. HTC, on the other hand, had to make do with the overheating platform and the result wasn’t pretty.