(late catch, added 2026-08-25) — Xiaomi ships a 3nm in-house flagship SoC, and TSMC builds it

What happened

Xiaomi unveiled the Xring/Xuanjie O3, a 3-nanometre flagship smartphone system-on-chip with more than 24 billion transistors, at its own Xring Chip Technology Communication Conference — and TSMC, not SMIC, provides the 3nm process that makes it. Xiaomi says the part is the first mobile SoC past a 5-million AnTuTu score (5.22M), with a 16-core GPU, LPDDR6 support and a claimed 45% AI-performance gain from added CPU acceleration units and eight neural-network GPU accelerators; it ships in the Xiaomi 18 Fold and Pad 9 Pro Max in China in September. Two further parts — the Xuanjie O100 AI accelerator (6nm) and the Xuanjie D100 autonomous-driving chip (3nm) — are finished and deploy next year. The direction of travel cuts against this thread's usual grain: design independence is what advanced here, while fabrication dependence on Taiwan stayed exactly where it was. A Chinese national champion reducing its reliance on foreign chip designers by deepening its reliance on a foreign chip fab is the sharpest available illustration that the stack's two halves are decoupling at different speeds. Cross-refs TSMC Capacity Race. (Caixin Global, Reuters via FMT)

Sources 2

Caixin Global caixinglobal.com unrated
Reuters via FMT freemalaysiatoday.com unrated

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The wider story

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