Finally, after a long time of speculation whether the Xiaomi Mi 5C will house a "Pinecone" processor or not has been answered. The name of the new chipset is Surge S1.
About Xiaomi's Surge S1 Chip
According to CNET, Xiaomi has announced that Mi 5C will be packing the 2.2 GHz Surge S1 chipset. The said chipset is built by Pinecone, a subsidiary started by the company two years ago. Xiaomi even claimed that the S1 Surge chip outperforms the Snapdragon 625, Qualcomm's midrange chipset. Furthermore, the Mi 5C is now known as the first smartphone to ever carry the company's very own in-house chipset.
History Of The Surge S1 Chip
As per Engadget, the Surge S1 chip had been an ongoing project since Xiaomi subsidiary Pinecone's establishment on Oct. 16, 2014. According to Lei Jun, the CEO of Xiaomi, Pinecone finished its first chip on Sept.19. Then on Sept. 24, the team made the first phone call using the chip's modem, which was followed by a successful screen boot-up two nights later. The Surge S1 chip was only finally good to go until 17 months later.
How Powerful Is The Surge S1 Chip?
Apparently, the chip consists of eight battery-friendly Cortex-A53 cores, four of which are clocked at 2.2 GHz while the other four at 1.4 GHz. In regards to its graphics performance, it is equipped with a Mali-T860 MP4 GPU, which is good enough for an average game. However, is has been noted that with these specifications, it is not close enough to match the performance of other high-performance chips. Instead, it falls closer between the performance of the Snapdragon 625 and of the Helio P20 processors.
More About The Mi 5c's Specs And Features
For the design, the Xiaomi Mi 5c features a body dimension of 144.4 x 70.7 x 7.1 mm. It has a front-facing fingerprint reader, dual-Nano SIM slots and a China Mobile Radio with VoLTE Support. Its casing color designs come in rose gold, black and gold variations.
For its display specs, the Mi 5c features a 5.15-inch display with a screen resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels. It also has 99.4 percent NTSC gamut and 550 nit brightness. For its platform, it runs on Android 7.1 Nougat out of the box and is packed with an octa-core Surge S1 processor clocked at 2.2 GHz.
For its internal memory specs, it features 64 GB of eMMC 5.0 storage with 3 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, no mention if there will be an expandable memory option. For its camera specs, the Mi 5c features a 12 MP rear camera with an aperture of f/2.2 and an 8 MP front camera with f/2.2 aperture.
Thanks to its battery-friendly Cortex-A53 cores, the Mi 5c will be housing a 2,860 mAh battery, thus achieving a slimmer metallic body in return. And in case you have doubts on its battery life, it also features a 9V/2A quick charge support which is guaranteed to come in handy as well. The Mi 5c, as reported, will hit the Chinese midrange market on March 3 with a price of 1,499 Yuan, which translates roughly at around $218.
