Oppo is allegedly developing custom smartphone chips internally that will see the light in less than 24 months. Like Apple and Google, the Chinese company also wants to reduce its reliance on processors designed by third parties and customize the chips according to its specific needs.
The ever attentive leaker Ice Universe has given us this news on Twitter. According to what was "twittered", Oppo is currently developing a new AP (Application Processor) internally and the team would even exceed a thousand employees. The new chip could already be ready for use for Oppo smartphones in 2024, a deadline that is not that far away.
OPPO has a chip development team of thousands of people, and will develop its own processor. and the industry is more optimistic about OPPO chips.
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) December 30, 2022
The customized chip that Oppo is preparing will replace the current Qualcomm Snapdragon and MediaTek chips. Probably, as already shown by Google with its Tensor, this chip will be highly optimized for the execution of specific processes such as Machine Learning or image processing.
The news might surprise the less attentive but, for the readers who follow us assiduously and who follow the changes of industry, this is not such unexpected news. For a couple of years Oppo has been presenting custom chips for smartphones that complement the SoCs during the INNODAY winter event. The first was MariSilicon X , designed to improve photos and videos, while the latest is MariSilicon Y , designed to improve Bluetooth audio.
Oppo is not even the first smartphone company to take this step . Over the years Huawei had demonstrated with its HiSilicon Kirin that it can give a hard time to competitors, while Samsung with its Foundary division has been producing solutions for years that it also sells to third parties (Exynos) and would have recently started the development of new APs with a team within the mobile division. More recently, Google has taken this step and we cannot fail to mention Apple Silicon, a family of chips which are then used on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
After Google, OPPO also joined the camp of independent research and development of AP.
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) December 30, 2022