Chips Designed By Xiaomi In-House To Power Next Generation Redmi Phones?

There have been on and off rumors over the past few months that Xiaomi intends to develop its own processors. While those rumors have never really been substantiated till now, new reports have emerged saying that Xiaomi is indeed looking at making their own chips in the future, much like other smartphone manufacturers, Samsung (Exynos), Apple (Ax series) and Huawei (Kirin).

Mr. Kevin Wang, Director of research at IHT Technology’s Chinese unit has reported on his Weibo account that the next generation Redmi devices will be powered by chips designed by Xiaomi. He also claims the chips are fast enough, when compared with the current generation entry-level chips found in the Redmi 2A.

For the uninitiated, the Redmi 2A is a variant of the Redmi 2, and is significantly cheaper, mostly on account of it running on the Leadcore LC1860 SoC, rather than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410, found on the Redmi 2. The LC1860 is a low cost SoC, manufactured by a Chinese fabless semiconductor company, called Leadcore Technology.

As a refresher, the Redmi 2A features 4.7-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, giving it a pixel density of 312ppi. It is powered by the aforementioned 1.4GHz quad-core Leadcore LC1860 SoC, which comes with a Cortex-A7 CPU and a Mali T628 GPU. The device comes with 1GB of RAM and 8 GB of built-in storage, which is expandable via a microSD card by up to 32GB. The smartphone also comes with an 8-megapixel rear camera with f/2.2 lens, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. The Redmi 2A comes with a 2200mAh battery with support for quick charging.

As for connectivity options, the phone supports TDD-LTE Bands 38, 39, 40, and 41. Other wireless connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. The phone comes with Wi-Fi Direct and also comes with wireless display functionality. The device also comes with GPS / A-GPS navigation, and is only 9.4 mm thick.

Source: Kevin Wang (Weibo.com)