Oppo phones could be running the company’s own custom SoC in as little as two years
It feels like everybody in smartphones isthinking about custom chipslately, and last month, Oppo launched the Find X5 series withthe MariSilicon X imaging NPU, its first-ever custom processor. We’ve been hearing thatOppo might produce its own chipsfor its smartphone for a while now, including full-blown SoCs. Now a new report adds fuel to that fire, attempting to lay down a more specific timeline for when this chip might arrive.
Chinese siteIT Home reportsthat Shanghai Zheku (Oppo’s IC design subsidiary) is currently working on an application processor, perXDA Developers. The AP will be produced on TSMC’s 6nm process and will supposedly enter mass production in 2023. The report notes that the company will then release an SoC that incorporates this application processor and a modem (and on a 4nm process, no less), sometime in 2024.
Details about the chips themselves are still largely up in the air (clock speeds, GPU, etc.) and we don’t even know if we’re talking about a flagship or more mid-range SoC. But these latest reports are at least in keeping with what we’ve heard so far.
The smartphone SoC market is becoming more competitive than ever. Aside from companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek making chips used in phones from all different brands, Android OEMs have been in and out of this space for a long time. For years, Samsung has createdits own Exynos chips, even though they’ve mostly lagged behind their Qualcomm counterparts. Huawei produced its own Kirin chips, but the US ban put the breaks on that. And just last year, Google debuted its in-house Tensor chip for thePixel 6andPixel 6 Pro.
Oppo sounds like it could be next in line, and its chipset ambitions would help reduce dependency on Qualcomm and MediaTek. We’ll have to wait and see if its custom solution ends up being an actual improvement, or just another among many SoC options.
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