Xiaomi: New Snapdragon alternative leaks with higher performance and fresh architecture

The Xiaomi 15S Pro made it to our test lab but not onto the European market. What made this Xiaomi 15 Pro offshoot special was mainly Xiaomi’s first in-house ARM chip, which puts the company in competition with Qualcomm and MediaTek and, in a sense, follows in Apple’s footsteps. That should not be overstated, since the majority of Xiaomi products will still ship with Snapdragon SoCs. However, Xiaomi apparently does not want to abandon the findings from the experiment either. According to observers, the second version of the Xiaomi SoC will follow in 2026, and it will apparently be called Xring O3 rather than Xring O2.

Where it will likely be used is also already fairly certain. Only the name of Xiaomi’s next foldable is still unknown. Mix Fold 5 would be the obvious choice, though some also believe it could be called Xiaomi 17 Fold. Whatever this Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 rival ends up being called this year, it should make for an interesting point of comparison with the many Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 foldables of the year, since the specs currently published by Ximitime based on a HyperOS code leak sound promising.

It is not yet clear which cluster and ARM architecture will be used here. The current Lumex generation with C1 Ultra and C1 Pro cores is suspected. Otherwise, however, the code already includes fairly detailed information about the cores. According to the code, Xiaomi is skipping the "big cores" this time. Instead, there will reportedly be a Prime core running at 4.05 GHz, which would be around 4% faster than before. A "Titanium Core" is said to run at nearly the same 3.42 GHz, while the heavily upgraded "little cores" are said to reach 3 GHz instead of the previous 1.79 GHz. The GPU is also expected to become much faster. At 1.49 GHz instead of 1.2 GHz, it would be almost 25% faster if the leak proves accurate.