Xiaomi confirms XRING 01 chip, aims to rival Snapdragon

Xiaomi’s XRING 01 chip is official. Built on a 4nm process, the chip aims to match Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 performance.-- The post Xiaomi confirms XRING 01 chip, aims to rival Snapdragon appeared first on Phandroid.

May 16, 2025 - 12:52

Xiaomi confirms XRING 01 chip, aims to rival Snapdragon

Xiaomi just made it official—the XRING 01 chip is real, and it’s coming this month. Co-founder Lei Jun confirmed it in a new post on Weibo, marking a bold move for the company as it braces for potential U.S. sanctions.

The Xiaomi XRING 01 chip is being developed by a 1,000-person team led by former Qualcomm exec Qin Muyun. That’s not a typo. A thousand engineers. And yes, Xiaomi’s trying to do what Huawei did with its Kirin chips—build something it can fully own and control.

This isn’t Xiaomi’s first time playing with custom silicon. They had the Surge S1 back in 2017, but it ran on an ancient 28nm process and never really went anywhere. XRING 01 is different. It’s a proper application processor (AP), reportedly built on TSMC’s 4nm node. Rumors say it’ll offer Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to Gen 2-level performance, with a 1+3+4 core layout: one Prime core at 3.2GHz, three performance cores at 2.5GHz, and four efficiency cores at 2GHz.

It won’t have custom CPU cores—just standard Arm—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The goal seems to be efficiency and control, not reinvention.

The first phone to ship with the XRING 01 chip? All signs point to the Xiaomi 15s. It’s expected to be a mid-cycle refresh of the Xiaomi 15 series, possibly alongside a 15s Pro. Most of the hardware will stay the same, but the chip swap could be the real story. The standard Xiaomi 15 and 15 Ultra still run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipsets, so this could be Xiaomi’s way of testing the waters without going all-in.

If it works, it’s a power move. If it doesn’t, they can always fall back on Qualcomm. Either way, the XRING 01 just made things interesting in the chip wars.

The post Xiaomi confirms XRING 01 chip, aims to rival Snapdragon appeared first on Phandroid.