Xiaomi To Announce Its Own SoC Named 'Pinecone' On February 28th

Xiaomi will be joining the league of companies manufacturing their own chipsets currently comprising of Samsung, Huawei, and Apple. The company has confirmed that it will be developing a custom SOC named "Pinecone".

The Chinese tech giant has confirmed on its Weibo page that it will be announcing its own chipset for the mobile devices on February 28. Xiaomi has sent out invites to the media for the SOC announcement in Beijing, China. The company has also created a Weibo page for its Pinecone SOC, reported Engadget.

It is being reported that Xiaomi's new series of processors will be manufactured by Beijing Pinecone Electronics. Xiaomi is starting to manufacture its own processors to reduce the dependence on the offerings from Qualcomm and Mediatek. This development will also avoid any patent related issues with the manufacturing companies. Currently, Xiaomi is already into a patent infringement case with Ericsson in India.

Last October, an unknown device from Xiaomi appeared on GeekBench and the phone had a custom SOC. So, it could be possible that the company had already tested the prototype version of the Pinecone processor last year.

Pinecone Electronics was set up by Xiaomi from a Chinese chipmaker Leadcore in November 2014. Xiaomi is also expected to take advantage of Leadcore's cellular radio technology for its own SOCs, thereby, reducing the cost further as reported by BGR.

Xiaomi's Pinecone processor is expected to come in two versions named Pinecone1 and Pinecone2. The Pinecone1 processor will be based on an Octacore Cortex A53 CPU and it will be manufactured using 10nm manufacturing process. Pinecone2 will also be an Octacore SOC but it will have two clusters comprising of four Cortex A73 cores and four Cortex A53 cores. It will also be based on 10nm manufacturing process.

Xiaomi can integrate more features into its SOC once the chip production is successful.  Manufacturing its own SOC, Xiaomi will become the second Chinese manufacturer in the world to do so. Xiaomi is expected to bring phones with its new SOC by the end of this year. The new phone with Pinecone SOC is believed to be Mi-5C.