36 comments

  • ksec 1 hour ago
    This is still an ARM C1-Ultra. Same one used in Mediatek dimensity 9500, which also got more than 4000 points in GB6 lab test. But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300.

    But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.

    This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.

    • pelagicAustral 1 hour ago
      > This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.

      And good news for everyone else.

      • yoz-y 54 minutes ago
        Yes and no. Having more competition in the space is excellent news. However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding as most other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country.
        • plutomeetsyou 1 minute ago
          Countries and institutions should always produce things where they are excellent at producing, in forms of specialization and compete in terms of comparative advantages.
        • TSiege 3 minutes ago
          I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0

        • cromka 52 minutes ago
          Except this trend is actually reversing now, with fabs being built outside of Taiwan?
          • cubefox 22 minutes ago
            It's not reversing, it's continuing the trend of more and more manufacturing moving to Chinese companies. It already happened to TVs and it's currently happening with RAM.
            • etse 15 minutes ago
              By Chinese company, do you mean Taiwan is Chinese in the same way China is Chinese?
              • mschuster91 4 minutes ago
                No. The problem is that TSMCs new capacity is already hogged by AI peddlers for years to come (in fact, AI BS is the reason why these new non-Taiwanese fabs got the massive US and EU subsidies), and so everyone else not flush with cash from the AI hypetrain has no alternative than to go to China - and deliver all their secrets to the CCP.

                And eventually, just like the Western solar, battery, pharma and car companies all have learned, the CCP will use that knowledge to surpass and undercut everyone else.

      • mschuster91 7 minutes ago
        No. Chinese dumpers undercutting everyone else and destroying the competition is never good.
    • cromka 53 minutes ago
      Now imagine if they actually provided a good support for Windows and Linux for those chips and started selling it to OEMs for Desktop/Laptop use.
      • ksec 12 minutes ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if Xiaomi intend to use this for their laptops with Windows 11 once the software ecosystem matures. Which both ARM and Qualcomm are working on. But I still believe in terms of PC usage it is all going to be Nvidia.
      • esperent 42 minutes ago
        Or allowed you to run Linux on their phone. We can only dream.
        • cromka 27 minutes ago
          They do allow to unlock their bootloaders, which is rather rare, which in turn allows to run Linux. Seeing as Chins just migrates their entire administration to Linux, it's not far fetched to assume they'll support Linux on their laptops very soon.
          • rootsudo 7 minutes ago
            Caveat on the unlocking of bootloader.

            It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.

    • shuwix 6 minutes ago
      Geekbench? Seriosly? 100x caught manipulating results for whoever pays.

      Obviously, Apple forgot to pay and this is Geekbench "friendly reminder" that there's a invoice to pay.

  • fishfasell 1 hour ago
    I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.
    • trynumber9 1 hour ago
      It's an ARM-designed CPU core, made in Taiwan. Very little difference from say MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity SoC just announced earlier because it is made on TSMC N3P instead of N2.

      I don't think they have any angle with that.

      • paimapi 56 minutes ago
        you say that like American lobbyists and Congress people are at-all technically minded and not just hyperbolic princes seeking influence at any cost
        • pandemic_region 34 minutes ago
          To be fair, describing the internet as a series of tubes is rather technical to some extent.
          • sekh60 29 minutes ago
            If they said "pipes" network admins probably would have given it a pass.
      • jinzo 52 minutes ago
        This thread is the perfect example of useful idiots with astroturfing. This is a CPU core designed by UK company (and owned by Japanese) made in Taiwan on equipment made in EU (with non trivial USA components). Xiaomi here is the easiest to replace in this chain (and the Chinese have very much tried to replace any of the others, failing for now). Yet they are angling for a huge PR win.
        • booi 50 minutes ago
          ARM is merely an IP portfolio licensing company. They don't really design or build anything. And everyone uses TSMC (who uses ASML). The primary design is still being done by Xiaomi, that's the most unique part of this build.

          Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.

          • tverbeure 29 minutes ago
            And how did that IP portfolio come into existence? Did it suddenly materialize out of thin air or… did ARM engineers design it?

            I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt: in your mothertongue, the meaning of “design” is not as broad as in English?

          • free652 46 minutes ago
            Really?! Did you read the announcement? C1 ultra cores are designed by ARM.

            >The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).

            >https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra

          • f1shy 41 minutes ago
            ARM does the design. What are u talking about?
          • adolph 13 minutes ago
            Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.

              Xiaomi has made the XRING 03 boast a larger die size than the XRING 01, 
              measuring 133mm² compared to its predecessor’s 109mm² dimensions This change 
              was deemed necessary as the flagship SoC features 16MB of SLC cache, not to 
              mention a new “6 + 4” CPU cluster that comprises two ARM C1-Ultra cores 
              running at 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores operating at 3.68GHz and lastly, 
              four C1-Pro cores running at 3.15GHz. [1]
            
            0. https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra

            1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...

          • refulgentis 35 minutes ago
            You are misunderstanding, and, they are not downplaying.

            A revision or other reply would benefit from explaining how their value chain x location correspondence is wrong - perhaps missing a step?

            Though, in anticipation of a revision, I wonder if its simple as you thought the cores were custom-designed by Xiaomi instead of standard ARM.

        • seanmcdirmid 49 minutes ago
          Did they license an actual chip design from ARM or just the ISA?
      • doublepg23 1 hour ago
        I'm not one to cry "foreign bots!" but this thread seems astroturfed after realizing this.
    • palmotea 1 hour ago
      > I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.

      The motivation for such messages may be greedy, but it doesn't mean the facts aren't wrong:

      1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.

      2. Free market incentives work counter to national security all the time, in many ways (e.g. causing domestic capabilities to wither and die).

      • paxys 1 hour ago
        Can we audit American corporations?
        • int0x29 3 minutes ago
          If you are an American company US backdoors are annoying but hard to avoid given the government will find ways to compell access anyway. Adding potential avoidable foreign back doors does not improve your security.

          I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.

        • ryandrake 1 hour ago
          Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.

          If "China" decides it doesn't like me, my life really isn't going to change much. If my electric company decides it doesn't like me, I'm in big trouble.

          • mring33621 1 hour ago
            Yeah, I don't want China as an adversary. It appears to me that it is a country full of fun, smart and interesting people. And their manufacturing prowess is incredible.

            I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!

          • thesmtsolver2 1 hour ago
            What about Russia and Ukraine?
            • lostlogin 49 minutes ago
              The answer varies depending on the day.
          • like_any_other 1 hour ago
            You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9], bribe your politicians [10], censor your media [11], universities [12,13,14], advertising and corporations in general [15,16], and even books [17].

            While they plan 50 years ahead, we are stuck re-litigating the most basic "united we stand, divided we fall" logic, even while the consequences are all around us. But congratulations on your enlightened individualism.

            [1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...

            [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673

            [3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...

            [4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro...

            [5] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2...

            [6] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...

            [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

            [8] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...

            [9] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...

            [10] Businesses with Chinese connections gave Australia's major parties more than $5.5 million between 2013 and 2015, making them easily the largest source of foreign-linked donations. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-21/australian-groups-str...

            [11] Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/apple-ch...

            [12] Chinese students in Australia fear reprisals at home if they speak out, inquiry hears - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/12/chine...

            [13] Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, says that [..] American scholars practice self-censorship about China and adopt the official narrative of the Chinese regime when talking about sensitive issues. “We don’t talk about ‘Taiwan independence.’ We talk about ‘the cross-Strait relations.’ We don’t talk about ‘the occupation of Tibet.’ We don’t call the June 4th Massacre ‘massacre.’ - https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-american-academy-misle...

            [14] China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/chinese-officials-co...

            [15] Leica Camera has sought to distance itself from a promotional video depicting photographers covering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown three decades ago, after it landed the German company in hot water in China. - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...

            [16] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...

            [17] China gets German children's book about COVID withdrawn - https://www.dw.com/en/china-gets-german-childrens-book-about...

            Edit as reply ("posting too fast", thanks HN) to all the "but the US also does bad things" "counterarguments":

            > Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.

            I'm European, and not stupid enough to believe that because the US is acting poorly or even in some cases hostile to Europe (to say nothing of the Middle East or South America), that we should roll over and allow China to subjugate us instead. Neither should the US. This is "you are not pure and innocent enough for self-defense" logic. Please don't drag the rest of us down in some deluded attempt at atonement.

            • Shorel 51 minutes ago
              > You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].

              All of South America already feels that way about the USA. Add the EU if we include the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard.

              Sadly Colombia just elected a US citizen as the new president. The "subordinate receivers of orders" status has been achieved.

              • ajmurmann 9 minutes ago
                This is what will happen when a hegemon realizes their power and elects someone scrupulous. That's why it's important to be the hegemon.

                Meanwhile look at the southchina sea shenanigans and the behavior of Chinese fishing fleets all over the world.

            • FpUser 59 minutes ago
              Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity. I do not see anything wrong with that.

              Secret police in Canada and stuff like this - yes go ahead nail them and kick those out of the country. Has nothing to do with the trade.

              • palmotea 44 minutes ago
                > Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity.

                No, the GP's comment is an attempt to correct the mistake you were so kind to outline. There's no reason we must stick with the approach set by a previous set of leaders who turned out to be short-signed and naive, and course corrections start with outlining the problems and contradictions of the present course.

            • llm_nerd 1 hour ago
              >[1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].

              As a Canadian, I am going to be honest and say that I thought at first you were describing the United States of 2026.

              I mean, we have a much better opinion of China. As does almost the entire world. For extremely good reason.

              There is one country bombing endless nations, stealing resources, engaging in sea piracy, undermining democracies, trying to destroy the West, and so on, and it is the United States of America under a juvenile halfwit self-dealing shitbag pedophile, working on behalf of an utterly deranged group of kleptocrats.

              Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.

          • lenerdenator 1 hour ago
            > I don't personally consider "China" my adversary

            They're not an adversary in the same way that a guy demanding your wallet at knifepoint is, or a company able to cut off your electricity is.

            China is an adversary in the sense that they're a totalitarian government, who, by the nature of that system, cannot brook any sort of opposition to their ideology, plans, or desires. All within the state, none without. That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time because doing so will suggest that the powers-that-be in China might not have all of the answers to the human condition. Either you fall in line, or you have to be eliminated.

            If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.

            • godelski 53 minutes ago
              An "adversary" can also just be a country we're in competition with. Both America and China are in competition for the global leader. Adversary could be akin to friendly competition if we all wanted to operate this way.
            • koverstreet 1 hour ago
              Instead of railing about ideology, try comparing the actions of the U.S. and China over the past 20 years. The U.S. has been far more interventionist and aggressive; China appears to be maturing and the U.S. is regressing.
            • isityettime 14 minutes ago
              > That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time

              When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.

              This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.

            • ok_dad 1 hour ago
              > That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time

              How in the world is the USA existing with other systems then? By taking it all over with force and subterfuge? It is obvious to those with eyes that China, despite being "totalitarian" has been the better actor (compared to the USA) on the world stage for decades now.

              > If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.

              Yea, because Americans are fucking violent jerks and can only get what they want through threats and intimidation.

            • TheDong 1 hour ago
              I mean, China's seems to be doing an okay job at coexisting with other countries.

              Especially when you compare it to the US, where our democracy and capitalism have led us to numerous wars and war-crimes.

              Like, just this year, we've committed far more breaches of international law than china https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_the_2026_Iran_war#...

              In recent history, we performed dozens of violent coups and destroyed countries in the name of overthrowing communist regimes.

              China has a totalitarian government, but it's existing more in harmony with the world than the US government has for all of my life, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese government will conflict with other countries while in the same breath implying the US government is better.

          • palmotea 1 hour ago
            > Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.

            I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.

            Myopically individualistic perspectives, focused on your individual wants and day-to-day experiences, miss a lot of stuff.

            • dofm 1 hour ago
              > I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.

              Nobody in Ukraine who wasn't already explicitly pro-Russian thought that in 2013, did they? Russia-aligned individuals poisoned the third president of Ukraine during his presidential campaign, very likely with direct assistance. You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.

              • palmotea 1 hour ago
                > You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.

                You're being too literal. I'm sure Ukrainians weren't actually so stupid as many Americans can be.

                My point is you could transplant that logic (elevate individual, myopic interests and gripes; lose sight of the community you're part of), into a situation that we've already seen play out (Ukraine v. Russia).

                • dofm 1 hour ago
                  I am observing that it is a bad analogy.

                  China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.

                  China isn't even a threat to the the daily life of individual Americans in the way that Russia was (and arguably is)

                  • palmotea 46 minutes ago
                    > China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.

                    My whole point is that looking at it from the perspective of the "daily life of individual Americans" is the wrong one.

                    Also, while no two situations are going to be exactly the same, I think it's false to say "China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans." It'd be happy to turn the US into a weak, low-tech country whose only exports are agriculture and natural resources. I can't find it right now, but I've read a quote from some high-level Chinese official to that effect.

        • palmotea 32 minutes ago
          >> 1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.

          > Can we audit American corporations?

          What's your point? Did you even read what I wrote? The five words of your comment seem to be pretty sloppy:

          1. If you're taking about their products, which is probably what you meant: if you think they're your adversary, then the answer is no, it's pointless.

          2. But your comment as written reads as if you're talking about auditing the corporations themselves, which does in fact happen (for tax and financial reporting purposes).

        • sigmoid10 1 hour ago
          Exactly. This is not a question of whether you get spied on, it is a question of who gets the monopoly for spying on you. Between extortion groups, cybercrime syndicates, foreign governments and last but not least my own government, there's not much room for real privacy online these days.
      • nixuserb58 20 minutes ago
        This is essentially asking every country in the world to be subservient to US tech in perpetuity. They didn't sign up for that.
      • throwaw12 1 hour ago
        To make conversation productive, please define "national security" in this case.

        For example, if China can't install its hardware in Pentagon, why is it a threat to national security.

        On the other hand, if you say, Intel will be in trouble because of these chips, then I would say, so what? Wasn't this a dream of MBAs, educated by the top US schools, to outsource everything in business to cheaper service providers (e.g. manufacturing to China, software development to India and etc,.)

        Where is the threat and what is the threat?

        • like_any_other 1 hour ago
          "To make conversation productive, please explain how outsourcing your strategic industry and know-how to geopolitical rivals and enemies is a threat."

          You have a funny definition of "productive".

      • like_any_other 1 hour ago
        3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources to show this is not a sudden new development:

        Back in 2014, the central government set up the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. - https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2145422/how-ch...

        Over the next decade, China plans to invest up to RMB 1 trillion (US$161 billion) into its domestic semiconductor industry as it seeks to become a global power in the sector. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly stated that developing its own integrated circuit (IC) industry is of integral national strategic concern. - https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chips-all-in-investing-i...

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...

        • zer00eyz 33 minutes ago
          > Over the next decade

          That was a 2016 article.

          We're at the other end of that investment.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhQrz9EJ40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KrdcTsScKk

          It did not quite turn out like china wanted.

          This isn't to be dismissive of what they ARE delivering - china has the potential to be very big in RAM, and Storage in the comming decades. But I'm not sure that they met their industrial and geopolitical goals with these efforts.

        • palmotea 1 hour ago
          > 3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources:

          Yeah, I agree. The US and its allies took the wrong lessons from the economic aspect of the cold war. They saw Western capitalism out-perform Soviet central planning, then let capitalist ideologues run amok.

          China has the advantage: since it's not run by capitalist ideologues it better able to correct the deficiencies of capitalism AND it can exploit predictable capitalist behavior for strategic advantage.

      • sleepgummies 1 hour ago
        [dead]
      • cyanydeez 1 hour ago
        OH, BUT we have fable! We have AI! of course we can answer these questions? can't we? which is true: America's AI is a super powerful defense against our enemies or America's AI is too stupid to defend against such a threat, and only sactions and import controls will suffice.

        Just seems like you're inventing things to be scared of.

        • NoidFonsense 1 hour ago
          it's a hardware problem, you run into engineering, materials, and physics issues. we're not talking about reverse engineering software
    • EQFitzgerald 1 hour ago
      Xiaomi doesn't do business in the US anyway.
      • tokioyoyo 33 minutes ago
        The angle is to pressure other countries to ban them as well.
    • ex1fm3ta 1 hour ago
      same playbook than Huawei
    • SigmundA 1 hour ago
      I wonder if the Trump T2 phone will get this chip.
      • Forgeties79 1 hour ago
        Man I forgot about that nonsense. I can’t imagine any self respecting person picking one up.
        • billfor 1 hour ago
          It's a U24 Pro - somebody compared them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1ytw85Npt8
          • Forgeties79 15 minutes ago
            So it’s an overpriced middle of the road phone to signal ones devotion to Trump and doesn’t actually deliver on several of its core promises (like made in USA).
        • mlnj 1 hour ago
          Still a massive market looks like.
          • Forgeties79 1 hour ago
            Last i read most of the money came from people not reading the fine print on their $100 deposit and only a few thousand have actually been distributed.

            Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still

            • jdiff 37 minutes ago
              "Looking now"? Is this something they publicize for some unknowable reason?
              • Forgeties79 18 minutes ago
                I don’t want to get bogged down in a source dispute - this is very easy to search and/but I only spent about 60s on it. I am hardly an expert. Feel free to look it up as well and tell me how I am entirely wrong. This was a combination of AI responses + thumbing through the sources linked to make sure it wasn’t invented whole cloth.

                I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.

                • jdiff 11 minutes ago
                  I don't think they are selling well, either. I was wondering at your source since it would be very atypical for any company to give any numbers at all, let alone a company that's so outwardly sketchy, let alone numbers like "This is the number of orders we have standing open despite being actively in production." This is the exact kind of thing I would not expect to be easy to search, and it'd be ripe for AI hallucination.

                  The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.

    • lenerdenator 1 hour ago
      I mean, yeah?

      It's generally a bad idea to use information-handling hardware from your main geopolitical rival.

      • lostlogin 52 minutes ago
        It can be confusing to follow who the rivals are. Russia and North Korea are friends and Canada is the enemy. China seems more liked than Canada.
    • philistine 1 hour ago
      And everybody forgets the true power of Apple: scale. Can that supposed miracle chip be readily found in million of phones within 6 months? Or will Xiaomi keep selling 90% of their phones with 2 year old chips, reserving these chips to their 2000$ foldables?

      This post serves Xiaomi because it implies competitiveness when the reality on the ground will remain unremarkable, and it helps fearmongers because they can latch on to Xiaomi's attempt to appear competitive.

      • cromka 1 hour ago
        Their power of scale applies to less and less regions. Xiaomi, in particular, delivers that to China where Apple previously slapped and now is becoming a niche player. It's the same as with German car makers. The trend have now reversed, with Chinese manufacturers starting to dominate on foreign markets and it's also something that was unfathomable just a few years back.

        They have proven countless of times by now that they are not to be ignored.

      • FpUser 1 hour ago
        When I buy my phones I do not give a flying fuck about "scale". All I care is what do I get for my pesos from various offerings.
        • boxed 1 hour ago
          What you get for the money IS scale.
          • FpUser 55 minutes ago
            Sounds like BS. I got me a nice phone and it is not from Apple
      • soulofmischief 52 minutes ago
        Are you really cheerleading right now for massive, monopolistic, post-capitalism corporations? The thing you have decided to focus on is not only irrelevant to the topic at hand, but irrelevant in the minds of most consumers.

        Current Apple hardware has a number of selling points for me, but the number of iPhones they've carelessly pumped into the world is not one of them. If anything, contemplating the amount of slave labor which Apple has contributed to leads to the opposite effect.

        Additionally, in China, Apple maintains around a quarter market share vs Android's three-quarters share. The argument you are making is not even coherent.

        I myself would be on a Xiaomi phone if GrapheneOS were able to support one.

  • strictnein 1 hour ago
    Missing the most important metric: processing power per watt.

    I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.

    • cyp0633 30 minutes ago
      some chinese youtubers have posted their test results, seems pretty good, but the devices have been provided to them in advance fwiw
      • StilesCrisis 1 minute ago
        I'm sure it benchmarks well, but does it actually have good battery life?
  • throwaw12 1 hour ago
    I love this, really, competition on a global scale is good for us, bad for greedy US corporations.

    For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)

  • comboy 1 hour ago
    This is nothing. China is about to start doing their own 5nm. When they roll out their own silicon at scale, I don't think there's catching up, nobody can match their manufacturing capabilities. Not even close.
    • culi 12 minutes ago
      They are already doing 5nm with multi-patterning DUV. But that's not the same as EUV machines. It is not nearly the same scale of production (with yields as low as 20%). They are still a few years away from indigenous EUV. Though I have to admit the shenzhen breakthrough was pretty impressive
  • jackb4040 1 hour ago
  • nerdsniper 1 hour ago
    M5 (iPad) AnTuTu: 3.5 million

    XRing O3 AnTuTu: 5.5 million

    ---

    M5 iPad Geekbench Single-Core: 3,556

    M5 Max Geekbench Single-Core: 4,300

    XRing O3 Geekbench Single-Core: 3,945

    ---

    M5 iPad Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,285

    M5 Max Geekbench Multi-Core: 29,200

    XRing O3 Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,221

    • throwa356262 1 hour ago
      I dont think Geekbench is a good cross-platform benchmark, given what it measures
  • tambourine_man 29 minutes ago
    “…of course, Apple may soon announce their next processor”

    I’m pretty sure they will, as they have, like clockwork, in the same month, for over a decade.

    • Schiendelman 24 minutes ago
      And reportedly early next year they have another coming out of band.
  • LPisGood 6 minutes ago
    Suspiciously ignored is power consumption. That’s the biggest and most useful metric often ignored because it’s less flashy than speed.
  • nazgulsenpai 12 minutes ago
    I think it's great that the Chinese are catching up and can compete directly with the incumbents. The GPU space I find really exciting with several new IPs out there that aren't quite ready for primetime, but still fascinating.

    Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.

  • otterley 1 hour ago
    I'm curious as to the performance per watt. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
    • diabllicseagull 1 hour ago
      no free lunch for a given process node I guess. It's using TSMC’s 3nm N3P.
  • trvz 1 hour ago
    "matches" could've also been written as "this year's product falls short of the competitor's last year one".

    And multithreaded is 10 cores vs 6 cores.

    I appreciate Apple being kept on their feet, but they're not dethroned yet.

  • yaro330 49 minutes ago
    How is this news worthy? The cores are off the shelf C1-Ultra. Even Google got them in the new pixel.
  • Alien1Being 51 minutes ago
    Xiaomi also make amazing cars.

    "WSJ

    I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore.

    https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/chinese-ev-test-drive...

    "

    • warkdarrior 1 minute ago
      That journalist may not want to buy American cars, but thanks to our enlightened government, they must buy American cars, since everything else is taxed significantly or banned altogether. Free market for all! /s
  • waazy 1 hour ago
    44mb of cache really highlights the bottleneck of how raw compute is cheap, but the real limit is memory latency.
  • Lagoon3384_SWE 6 minutes ago
    This site is just crazy pro-china now. Guess that happens when non-westerners dominate online, sadly.
    • gameman144 3 minutes ago
      I don't see any editorializing, mostly just reports that China is actually competing well.

      Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.

    • himata4113 3 minutes ago
      Have you considered that china has been working on these things for the past decade and they're finally getting results out of that?

      And yes, it is known that they do steal tech as samsung discovered in their tech preview phone bust in korea.

  • dfedbeef 1 hour ago
    Yay free markets China makes a fast chip Yay national security
  • StrLght 46 minutes ago
    Would be nice to see some independent numbers and benchmarks. Apparently, Xiaomi announced this SoC today, so there's no 3rd party data about it.
  • hn_submit 1 hour ago
    Yeah but they can't use TSMC to make it so they'll have to make due with older or more expensive lithography processes.

    That probably explains why there's so few of these CPUs around: the yields of the domestic Chinese lithography processes (non-EUV) are awful.

    • trynumber9 1 hour ago
      Xiaomi has not been sanctioned like Huawei. So it is made by TSMC on N3P. The Huawei chips, made by SMIC, are so far behind they're not competitive at all with even Xiaomi's first generation chip.
    • blackoil 1 hour ago
      Xiaomi can and does use TSMC.
  • bip-bop-robot 1 hour ago
    RIP Mediatek, RIP Qualcomm
  • AM1010101 45 minutes ago
    Interesting how quickly they seem to have caught up.
  • celsoazevedo 1 hour ago
    Nice. Let's see if they perform well in the real world.
  • romanovcode 32 minutes ago
    Good. Competition is great for consumers.
    • brcmthrowaway 30 minutes ago
      If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?
      • wds 24 minutes ago
        Not good for us if it gets banned domestically because the US can't compete in a free market.
      • romanovcode 14 minutes ago
        Who is "us"?
      • palmotea 24 minutes ago
        > If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?

        I'm too stupid or mad a Trump to care.

  • thefourthchime 1 hour ago
    This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers — around *3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core* — are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.

    But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?

    This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.

    • cogman10 1 hour ago
      Were I to guess

      > The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).

      This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.

      Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.

      • bri3d 1 hour ago
        > Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.

        I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.

        Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).

      • brigade 1 hour ago
        All 10 cores support the same extensions. It’s silly to implement an SoC any other way, and it’s been a decade since someone has last made that mistake.
    • alain94040 1 hour ago
      It will be interesting to find out the details. From the block diagram, the core only issues 10 instructions per cycle, so not especially wide. Maybe the performance will be worse once in a real phone in real thermal conditions, but if that's true, it could make for a very interesting laptop or desktop chip. Time will tell.
      • brigade 1 hour ago
        The C1-ultra has a decode of 10 instructions but can issue up to 23 uop per cycle, that’s a good bit wider than any other CPU. In particular, I believe it’s the first CPU to have a 4th load pipeline.
    • ksec 1 hour ago
      It is just the same as MediaTek Dimensity 9500. They managed 4000+ point in lab, but real world it was much closer to 3300.

      It is still not a bad results though. And we are about to see MediaTek Dimensity 9600 based on ARM C2-Ultra.

    • thesmtsolver2 1 hour ago
      Doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Look at the top comment thread: just politics and no discussion of the tech.
    • RicoElectrico 1 hour ago
      > But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can.

      From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)

  • pmkary 1 hour ago
    Sad thing is that it'll still be running the damn Android and so JVM not C or Swift on the machine.
    • ZenDroid 3 minutes ago
      There's no JVM in Android. Never has been.
    • fg137 1 hour ago
      What's the point of the complaint? Is there anything better that is commercially viable?

      Your Linux based dream phone is not going to sell more than 10 units.

      • otterley 1 hour ago
        I think they might be saying that there's still no supported way to build a native-code app on the Android OS. It could be construed as a plea to make that happen in order to unlock greater performance, not necessarily a desire to have a DIY Linux-based OS option.
      • yndoendo 59 minutes ago
        Ignoring the native vs java runtime interface application difference between Android and iOS, which the top poster was was referencing.

        Your Linux phone statement is a fallacy.

        Ask FuriLabs how many of their phones they have sold.[0] High confident it is more than 10.

        FuriLabs moved their batman, battery monitoring application, from Python to C and it really improved performance. Native applications really do keep resource usage low and is beneficial.

        [0] https://furilabs.com/

        • frollogaston 55 minutes ago
          They don't publish sales numbers, but I've never seen one. So probably somewhere between 10 units and significant market share.
      • MobiusHorizons 1 hour ago
        I believe the comparison is with iOS not Linux. Android is Linux after all. It’s just that most programs don’t get to run a that level of abstraction, and instead run on top of a jvm. At least in iOS the code does seem to be able to be more efficient due to to higher usage of natively compiled code, which is what I think the op was complaining about.
  • cute_boi 46 minutes ago
    US Government - China is a security risk & they will steal our data. We should ban xiaomi for national security risk. We found the phone collecting telemetry..... just like google and apple.
  • khalic 1 hour ago
    LPDDR6... that's not enough for speedy inference
    • CharlesW 1 hour ago
      It depends on the number of channels. The Xring O3 appears to have 4×24-bit channels, so 113.8 GB/s. The iPhone 17 Pro's memory bandwidth is ~76.8 GB/s. Seems fine?
      • rpdillon 1 hour ago
        If I recall correctly, Strix Halo gets about 450G/s. The M series processors get between 400 and 800G/s, and an actual NVIDIA card is like 5.5T/s. 113G/s is pretty slow for inference.
        • dust42 56 minutes ago
          The CPU is for mobile phones. An Nvidia H200 has 4.8TB/s. An RTX 5090 has 1.8TB/s. Both use ~700W - not comparable with a phone.
        • trvz 1 hour ago
          Strix Halo is 256 GB/s.
    • hoherd 1 hour ago
      Oh thank heavens, computing hardware that the AI companies will not buy all of the supply of.
    • simlevesque 1 hour ago
      Not every computing platform is expected to do fast inference.
    • rjzzleep 1 hour ago
      Maybe,but memory bandwidth is much better than on the DGX Spark at least.
      • khalic 1 hour ago
        I hate this RAMpocalypse so much
        • fauigerzigerk 1 hour ago
          On the other hand, this year's RAMpocalypse could be 2028's RAMbundance ;P
          • khalic 25 minutes ago
            RAMvana was right there!!
  • jeffbee 1 hour ago
    Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.
    • Thomashuet 1 hour ago
      Yes it is. I've bought a MacBook air despite despising MacOS (with the hope that Asahi support will come eventually) because the processor currently has no competition.
      • jeffbee 35 minutes ago
        That's sort of weird though because unless the operating system supports your applications, the performance of the processor cannot be appreciated.
    • turblety 42 minutes ago
      I don't like Apple as a company or how they act around locking people out of the devices they buy.

      I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.

      It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.

      So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.

    • adgjlsfhk1 18 minutes ago
      the MacBook neo has faster single core perf than any x86 laptop (for the first 0.5 sec which is what matters for ui responsiveness).
    • mceachen 1 hour ago
      The general workload performance (browsing, text editing) is comparable for neo and m* MacBooks afaict.

      Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.

      • jeffbee 37 minutes ago
        Why would we compare it to an 8-year-old design? For browsing, the current MBP smokes the MBN, by margins of roughly one-third. It is a significant and noticeable regression. For sustained workloads like software development or even running the MacOS updates, it is a huge and glaring regression. But it's still good kit.
  • brcmthrowaway 1 hour ago
    Insane if true. Does Xiaomi sell laptops?
    • t-3 1 hour ago
      Yeah, but they're just normal Intel stuff.
    • npn 1 hour ago
      I have Mi Notebook Pro. Not that bad actually.

      But they have stopped making premium laptop since then.

  • gok 1 hour ago
    "Arm-designed CPU core matches Apple-designed CPU core from a year ago"
  • select1 5 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • lowbloodsugar 1 hour ago
    What! I was told China is behind and full of dangerous malware! Everyone knows corrupt little communists can’t make a good chip! /s
  • ur-whale 1 hour ago
    2020's US geopolitical doctrine:

    1) Pick a historically extremely innovative and disciplined culture which also happens to have massive human capital

    2) Please arbitrary artificial ill-thought-out economic constraints on them

    3) wait a while

    4) get a bunch of magnificent spanking in return (AI, chips, etc...)

    • cromka 49 minutes ago
      This worked just as well in the 1980s when they wanted to protect their auto industry...
  • ajaimk 1 hour ago
    Apple's *Last Year* CPUs. We're literally about to get a new chip in 2-3 weeks from them.
    • fg137 1 hour ago
      Still better than what Qualcomm is offering?
      • otterley 1 hour ago
        I'm not sure that it matters. You can't put a Qualcomm chip in an iPhone and you can't put Apple Silicon in any other device. So there's no really straightforward way to compare them other than specs on paper, which we all know are theoretical until they get integrated.
    • juiceland 1 hour ago
      The real concern is supply chains. The US can design but not manufacture, whereas it appears China can do both.
      • strictnein 58 minutes ago
        In this case, a Chinese company is using a Taiwanese manufacturer (TSMC), so they're not doing both.
      • celsoazevedo 1 hour ago
        > whereas it appears China can do both

        Not these. They seem to be using ARM-designed cores that others already use and TSMC fabs in Taiwan.