Xiaomi Mi 5c Unveiled In China, Features In-House Octa-Core CPU, Surge S1 SoC

Many companies and start-ups are unveiling smartphones and other gadgets at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but Xiaomi has decided to go against the flow and had its own event in Beijing. Xiaomi had two major announcements, first is the in-house chipset named Surge S1 and other is a Xiaomi Mi 5C smartphone, powered by the new processor.

Xiaomi Mi 5C smartphone is powered by the company's own SoC chipset. The Mi 5c is priced at RMB 1,499 (or approx Rs. 14,560), and it's going to be available in China beginning March 3.

The Xiaomi Mi 5C sports a 5.15-inch Full HD (1080p) display, 3GB RAM with 64GB inbuilt storage, and dual-SIM support. Smartphone is running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Xiaomi's MIUI 8 layer on top. Xiaomi has said the phone will be upgradable to Android 7.1 Nougat in the March. Xiaomi Mi 5C packs a 2860mAh battery with fast charging support.

Xiaomi Mi 5C Weighs 135 grams and comes with a dual-Nano-sim support and connectivity options like 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB Type-C and more.  On the camera front, the Xiaomi Mi 5C features a 12-MP rear-facing camera. At the front, it comes with an 8-megapixel camera. The fingerprint sensor is below the home button in the front, according to Indian Express.

The Surge S1 chipset is the first in-house chipset, which has built with Pinecone electronics (a company the smartphone maker owns), using an octa-core ARM cortex A53 processor and including four 2.2GHz cores and four 1.4GHz cores.  The name "Surge" is a rough translation of the actual Chinese name of the chipset. The processor comes with 8 Cortex A53 cores, half of them clocked at 2.2 GHz and the other half at 1.4 GHz. The GPU of the Surge S1 Chpset is Mali-T860, and there is VoLTE support. It is made on the 28 nm HPC process and has "lower power consumption for daily use," as per GSM Arena.

Xiaomi added that the whole process of creating the Surge S1 chipset has taken 28 months to complete. The company also shared GeekBench 4.0 CPU multi-core benchmark and GFXBench Manhattan off-screen benchmark, claiming that the Surge S1 chipset beats the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 and MediaTek Helio P20 in terms of performance.