Finnish brand Nokia and Chinese brand Xiaomi reportedly entered into an agreement, where the former will use the latter's in-house Surge S1 chipset to power its upcoming mid-range smartphone since the SoC is a mid-range one.
This news is revealed by a Weibo user @Reviewer_ ?? saying that an internal person from Xiaomi has given a statement to him. In recent times, numerous reports were claiming that Xiaomi will use Nokia's patents to enter the US market, but there's no info on this. However, speculations claim that both the companies have established a partnership to work together in the future. But there's no official information from neither Xiaomi or Nokia.
For the uninitiated, Xiaomi, earlier this year launched its first in-house Surge S1 chipset. The S1 is an octa-core processor, comprising of four 2.2GHz Cortex A53 cores for intensive tasks and four 1.4GHz Cortex A53 cores to handle day-to-day tasks. The chipset is paired with Mali-T800 MP4 GPU to handle graphic-heavy tasks such as games.
Also, Xiaomi used the chipset in the Mi 5c smartphone, which received decent reviews in China. The surprising fact is that the Surge S1 chipset achieved better benchmark scores than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chip. This might be due to the better clock speed of the Surge S1 chip.
It will be interesting to see a Nokia smartphone with Surge S1 chipset. At the moment, there are no details on which Nokia smartphone will use the Surge S1 chipset.
Nevertheless, it's quite an achievement for Xiaomi as another brand will utilise the company's first-ever chipset. This will motivate the company to manufacture chipsets in a larger number and at a faster pace as well. For the unknown, a Finnish upstart HMD Global acquired the license to manufacture and brand Nokia smartphones in 2016 and already released three Android smartphones- Nokia 6, Nokia 5, and Nokia 3.