Xiaomi has been gaining popularity quite rapidly as one of the most sought-after smartphone companies in the market, and it did something unprecedented when it launched Mi 5C in February 2017 and powered it with a self-made chipset going by the name of Pinecone Surge S1. What followed the launch was an expectation of a successor to the Surge S1, in the form of Surge S2, and it was supported by a report published in April 2018 that stated that TSMC was already in the process of manufacturing the Surge S2 for Xiaomi using the 16 nm FinFet process.
It was also rumored that the chipset would make its appearance alongside Mi 6C in MWC 2018, but it proved to be nothing more than a rumor. Further speculations also suggested that the chipset would appear with Mi 8. But nothing came of that either.
Addressing the situation, Xiaomi’s product director, Wang Teng Thomas, has finally said that the chipset, which is still being developed, is facing some unforeseen issues which are delaying its completion. He has also assured users that the chipset’s development has not been altogether abandoned.
Coming to the specs of the chipset in question, the Xiaomi Surge S2 may utilize an octa-core design with four Cortex-A73 cores, clocked at 2.2 GHz, and four Cortex-A53 cores, clocked at 1.8 GHz. It shall be equipped with a Mali G71MP8 GPU supporting UFS2.1 and LPDDR4 memory, but not a CDMA network. A comprehensive performance evaluation of Surge S2 shows its similarity to Kirin 960, while its predecessor seems to have performance higher than that of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625. The S1, for its part, is also an octa-core processor with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and four A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz. It has an ARM’s Mali-T860 for a GPU.
