OPPO is to unveil its first-gen in-house chipset, now slated as an NPU, in December 2021

OPPO has been linked to the development of its very own proprietary chipset for some time. Now, the OEM has not only confirmed outright that this is the case, but that the silicon in question is ready for launch. It will be unveiled on December 14, 2021, during the first half of the company's annual Inno Day event.

This novel product, occasionally referred to as "Project Mariana", has been slated as more of an answer to Xiaomi's Surge C1 chipset than a response to Apple's full-scale M1-series processors. Accordingly, it has been thought it might emerge as an in-house image signalling processor (ISP), much like that found in the latest phones from OPPO's sister OEM, Vivo.

However, the eminent leaker Digital Chat Station has just jumped onto this subject with a claim that Mariana is in fact more of an NPU, although it might indeed specialize in imaging within a compatible device. On that note, the tipster asserts it will not be too long before the first piece of OPPO tech with the upcoming chipset will be on the market.

Even if this newly official in-house chipset turned out to be not much more than a new first-party ISP, it would represent a significant achievement (not to mention investment) for the mobile device OEM. Digital Chat Station already claims that it has a 6 nanometer (nm) architecture and was manufactured to OPPO's order by TSMC, and, as such, must have cost a pretty penny to mass-produce. 

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