Xiaomi has just announced their own chipset. Say hello to the Surge S1

Xiaomi has just joined a very exclusive club of phone vendors that have the mojo and the lucre to create their own chipsets. Today, they’ve announced their first in-house SoC, the Surge S1 along with the first phone that will be powered by it – the Mi 5C.

The Surge S1 is an octacore processor that uses eight ARM Cortex-A53 processors arrayed in a big.LITTLE architecture paired with a Mali T-860 GPU that supports 4K video. Four of the Surge S1’s  ARM Cortex A-53 cores are clocked at 1.4GHz to handle basic grunt work while another four ARM cores are clocked at a faster 2.2GHz to handle graphic intensive work. According to Xiaomi, the Surge S1 has enough pixel crunching grunt to outperform a Snapdragon 625. The Surge S1 also supports 32-bit DSP with VoLTE connectivity, meaning that it’ll work with YES YTL’s phone networks and also integrates an image signal processor (ISP) for better quality images on the rear camera.

The Mi5C is the first Xiaomi phone to come with the chip. Built around the new Surge S1 processor is a 5.15-inch , 2,560 x 1,600 pixel resolution display, a 12-MP rear camera with a 6-element lens capable of 4K video capture @30fps, 1080p at up to 120fps and 720p @ 240fps. The battery also supports fast charging. It will hit stores in China first at RMB1,499 (about RM970) though there’s no word on an official Malaysia launch yet.