Here's all you need to know about Xiaomi's upcoming Surge S2 SoC

Xiaomi is one of the biggest smartphone brands in the world right now, as data shows the company sitting at fifth in the global market share leaderboard. Above the Chinese giants are Samsung, Apple, Huawei, OPPO, and Vivo, in that order. Something peculiar to the top three companies on that list is the fact that they all have in-house SoCs that power their devices. Samsung with Exynos, Apple with its A-series chipsets, and Huawei with its Kirin lineup. Xiaomi, just over a year ago, released its first in-house SoC, the Surge S1, with the processor powering the company's Mi 4C mid-ranger that was released a while later. A successor to that SoC is already set for deployment, though, and leaks point towards to a capable offering by the company.

The Surge S2, the upcoming second-generation SoC, will be an octa-core chipset, with four performance Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.2GHz, and four power-efficient Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. On the GPU end, it will feature a Mali G71 MP8 unit. It's also said to support LPDDR4 RAM and UFS 2.1 storage. Details of its ISP are unknown but on the connectivity end, it's expected to not support CDMA networks. 

This is an impressive spec sheet, of course, and it's one that reminds us of the Kirin 960. The Kirin 960 powered Huawei's last-gen flagships and was quite close to the Snapdragon 835 in terms of performance. The 960 featured the same GPU as what has been touted for the Surge S2, and the same core setup, albeit with slightly overclocked Cortex-A73 cores (2.4 GHz vs 2.2 GHz). The G71 MP8 GPU doesn't exactly hold up to the Adreno 540 but is slightly more powerful than the Adreno 530. All of that considered, we would place the S2 alongside the Snapdragon 821, in terms of performance at least, which is impressive considering this is Xiaomi's second try at producing its own SoC.

Earlier rumors said it would be based on a 10nm manufacturing process but that will not be the case, as it will be built on TSMC's 16nm process instead. Not overly impressive but good enough, especially when considering how much performance it offers and the fact that it's meant to be a mid-range SoC.

The Surge S2 is expected to see its first use on the Mi 6X, the natural successor to the Mi 5X that was released in H2 2017.