The rumor comes from an industry insider in China.
It’s gossip grapevine time here again at Unbox and we’ve got a juicy one today. Apparently, there are rumors that Nokia’s HMD Global Oy is planning to use Chinese electronics titan Xiaomi’s recently-released Surge S1 chipset for their upcoming mid-range offerings.
To recap, the Xiaomi Surge S1 is a chipset that utilizes eight cores with ARM’s big.LITTLE core clustering – four 2.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores for the heavy tasks, plus four 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 cores for the lighter routines. The Surge S1 is also powered by an ARM Mali-T680 MP4 GPU for middle-ground graphics throughput. The Xiaomi Mi 5c is the first handset to employ the chipset and is currently benchmarked at AnTuTu with a performance tier slightly below Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625.
The rumor doesn’t specify whether Nokia will be using Xiaomi’s proprietary SoC for China-only handsets or for a wider, global audience. If true, though, we might be seeing Xiaomi push in further with chipset development, given the industry interest. Maybe they’ll come up with a flagship tier chipset offering in the near future?
