The company Xiaomi is known primarily as a manufacturer of smartphones and other electronics, but little is known that it has dabbled in chips in the past. A few years ago, it launched a mobile chipset called the Surge S1. Now it is about to introduce a new chip and according to the hints given in the teaser image, it will also bear the name Surge.
The Surge S1, its only commercially available chip so far, was introduced by Xiaomi in 2017 and used in the budget smartphone Mi 5C. So the new chipset could also be a smartphone processor. However, developing a mobile chipset is a very complex, expensive and time-consuming task. Even companies like Huawei took years to come up with competitive processors. So it's theoretically possible that Xiaomi is developing a less ambitious piece of silicon that will be part of the standard Snapdragon chipset. Google has come up with a similar strategy in the past with its Pixel Neural Core and Pixel Visual Core chips, which were integrated into Qualcomm's flagship chipset and boosted machine learning and image processing performance. So the Chinese tech giant's chip could offer a similar "boost" and leave everything else to the Snapdragon 800 series chip. What the chip will actually be, we will find out very soon - Xiaomi will launch it on March 29.
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