Smartphone giant Oppo launches its first chip, joining Chinese rivals Huawei and Xiaomi in semiconductor race

Name: There’s a global semiconductor shortage and this is why it matters
Uploaded: 2021-12-14T09:44:26.000Z
Duration: 6 min 1 s
Description: There’s a global semiconductor shortage and this is why it matters

The MariSilicon X is designed for faster and better image processing, Oppo said, and it will launch with new Find X series phones in Q1 2022

The company also unveiled its new AR eyewear called Air Glass, which it hopes will be a third screen alongside smartphones and smartwatches

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Oppo unveiled its first self-designed chipset, the MariSilicon X, during its InnoDay event on December 14, which the company said offers faster and better image processing. Photo: Oppo

Iris Deng

Published: 5:44pm, 14 Dec 2021Updated: 8:04pm, 14 Dec 2021

Oppo, one of the largest smartphone brands in China, has unveiled its first in-house image processor, which is dedicated to enhancing imaging performance on handsets, joining rivals like Huawei Technologies Co and Xiaomi in a chip-design race amid Beijing’s push for self-reliance in semiconductors.

Called MariSilicon X, the new chipset is a neural processing unit (NPU) – designed to implement machine learning algorithms – built using the 6-nanometre node process of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). Oppo said the chip enables faster image and video processing with less battery drain. The chip was unveiled at the company’s InnoDay event on Tuesday.

“MariSilicon X is only a small step for Oppo,” Oppo founder and CEO Chen Mingyong said during the launch event. “We won’t stop and we will continue to invest resources into chips, with a team of thousands of people. It will be a long journey, with many challenges ahead, but we will persevere.”

The first phones to feature the new chip will be Oppo’s Find X series handsets, which are slated to launch in the first quarter of 2022. Compared with the Find X3 Pro, the company’s current flagship device, Oppo said the MariSilicon X will enable that phone’s successors to take photos with four times greater dynamic range, produce clearer videos in dark environments, and process images 20 times faster.

Shenzhen-based Oppo, which like Vivo was started by BBK Electronics, was the fourth largest smartphone maker in the world in the third quarter, according to Counterpoint, which included the recently merged OnePlus brand in the shipment numbers. That status is owed mostly to its popularity in China, where it ranks second only to Vivo.

Oppo is now one of multiple Chinese smartphone companies seeking to develop its own chips in the wake of US sanctions on Huawei that have stunted the growth of that firm’s chip unit HiSilicon. Since the telecoms equipment maker was put on a trade blacklist in 2019, Beijing has accelerated efforts to grow more domestic chip makers, both in design and manufacturing.

Huawei’s Kirin processors once competed with high-end chipsets from the likes of Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm. But the captive chip design house, which had to outsource the manufacturing of its silicon, was unable to keep up after being cut off from using US technology to make advanced chips.

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There’s a global semiconductor shortage and this is why it matters

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