Xiaomi’s new Surge chipset launch delayed – still in development

Back in February 2017, Xiaomi launched its own chipset, the Surge S1, developed alongside with Pinecone. The SoC powered the company’s newest phone then, the Mi 5C, wich wasn’t exactly a hit – the device suffered from poor battery life and a weak hardware overall. Nevertheless, it was expected to be succeeded by the Mi 6C last year, rumoured to feature a Surge S2 chipset. But well, this never happened.

Since then, Xiaomi has gone silent about the Surge S1’s successor. A few rumours still surfaced over the last year regarding its production (some even tipped it would be released along with the Mi 8), but there was no official statements from the company about the situation. Until now.

Today, Xiaomi’s product director Wang Teng Thomas has finally thrown some light on that matter through Weibo. In response to a netizen’s question, he confirmed that the chipset is indeed still in production, having also hinted that the process is being delayed by unexpected issues.

The Surge S2 is expected to launch with an octa-core design, comprising four Cortex-A73 cores (clocked at around 2.2GHz) and four Cortex-A53 cores (clocked at around 1.8GHz). The chipset will probably come with a Mali G71MP8 GPU, which will support UFS2.1 and LPDDR4 memory, placing its performance somewhere close to the Kirin 960’s.