Xiaomi ships 3nm Xring O3 to loosen Qualcomm reliance

Xiaomi introduced a 3nm mobile system-on-chip that it designed in-house and had TSMC fabricate, and pitched the launch openly at loosening Qualcomm's and MediaTek's grip on Chinese flagship phone silicon. In Bloomberg's account of the launch, the company said it will keep building its own chips to "gain more control over key components and reduce its reliance on chip suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek."

The headline part, the Xring O3, is a 10-core design that "packs 24 billion transistors into a 133mm2 die made using TSMC's N3P process." It is the first smartphone SoC to support LPDDR6 memory, with up to 113.8GB/s of peak bandwidth. "Xiaomi's Xring O3 has achieved an AnTuTu score of 5.22 million, far surpassing every smartphone processor currently available," Ice Universe posted on X, adding that GPU performance jumped 85%. Xiaomi says the chip is already in mass production and will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold and Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max in September.

Two sibling parts launched the same day. The Xring O100 is a 6nm AI accelerator built with 3D wafer-level stacking, with 28,672 effective data lines and up to 1.22TB/s of near-memory bandwidth; Xiaomi expects it to run on-device inference for its MiMo language model across smartphones, connected cars and robotics. The Xring D100 is a 3nm chip designed for autonomous driving.

Qualcomm and MediaTek are gearing up to launch their 2nm chips, so Xiaomi's flagship enters a market that will be a process node ahead of it inside a year. The launch lands in the same 24-hour window as Taiwan indicting nine over Nvidia B300 servers smuggled to China, part of a wider stretch in which every advanced-node customer in the region is now watched closely, one of more than 300 China AI stories we've tracked in the last 90 days.