Xiaomi is preparing to release its own in-house mobile processor. Called ‘Pinecone’, the SoC will apparently be used in Xiaomi’s next generation of smartphones; although details are light at the moment.
Officially, the only thing we know about Pinecone is that it will be unveiled on 28 February 2017, and nothing else. This date appears to be timed to happen in conjunction with Mobile World Congress 2017. Although, Xiaomi itself will not be attending the conference.
Unofficially, Chinese tech site IT168 has shared what it claims is a benchmark for one of two Pinecone SoCs. According to the image, Pinecone is an Octa-core processor clocked at 1.4GHz. The site believes that this is the lower end version of Pinecone; which features eight Cortex-A53 cores. The higher end Pinecone is supposed to have four Cortex-A73 and four Cortex-A53 cores.
Pinecone is also set to appear in a device called the Xiaomi Meri, with a chance of appearing in the Xiaomi Mi 5C. There really is no telling what these are or when they will be released at this point.
Xiaomi partnered with processor manufacturer Leadcore back in May 2015 to design a new set of chips for its devices. Which means that this announcement has been a long time coming. It’ll be interesting to see what the two have managed to come up with over the space of a year and a half.
