Mehul Reuben DasJan 03, 2023 16:47:48 IST
Several smartphone manufacturers have had to come up with new and innovative solutions to deal with the heat and sometimes battery drain that accompany some of the most popular chipsets. In other instances, they had to develop special hardware to allow their designers to add features that they would like their smartphones to have.
Oppo, like Google, plans to start making their own SoC and chipsets that will be based on Oppo’s MariSilicon X processors. They plan to use TSMC’s 3nm process foundries.
Oppo, for example, developed the MariSilicon X ISP and the new MariSilicon Y Bluetooth chip for various unique features that they wanted their smartphones to have. This, apparently has given the people at Oppo’s headquarters the idea to develop their own chips and SoCs. The tech giant is planning to introduce its own smartphone chipset in 2024.
Oppo has allegedly hired thousands of people to work on the project, but unfortunately, further details are scarce for now. It will almost certainly be an ARM-based chip meaning it will use Cortex CPUs and Mali GPUs with MariSilicon designs slotting in for things like the ISP and parts of the wireless connectivity.
It will be interesting to see who Oppo picks as their manufacturing partner in this endeavour. Google, when they decided that they want to use their own SoCs, decided to go with Samsung as designing a whole chipset from the ground up is a complicated process even when using ready-made pieces. But if Oppo’s team is really that big a ground-up design isn’t out of the question.
Last year MediaTek announced the Dimensity 5G Open Resource Architecture and opened its chipsets to customizations by smartphone makers, although we haven’t seen anything as extensive as the Tensor chip.
Just over a year ago, we saw a rumour that Oppo is interested in building a custom chipset based on TSMC’s 3nm node. Back then the report claimed that the first phones with the new silicon will arrive in 2023, but TSMC’s 3nm foundries experienced some delays, which may have thrown a wrench in those plans. For what it’s worth, the MariSilicon X chip is fabbed at TSMC’s 6nm foundries, so the two companies already have a working relationship.
Even Samsung Electronics reportedly wants to build a custom chip, separate from the Exynos chips supplied by its sister company Samsung System LSI. It doesn’t always work out, though, Xiaomi gave it a shot in 2017 with the Surge S1, but that fizzled out quickly.
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