Edited by BellaRose Okojie
A smartphone chip or processor is the brain of any mobile device. Many phone manufacturers have made the chip of their flagship devices a unique selling point because the more powerful the chip, the smoother the user experience.
For years, Android phones have been powered by Qualcomm and MediaTek chips. For low-end budget devices, UniSoc is a more common smartphone chip producer. These 3 companies cater to the needs of thousands of Android smartphone manufacturers totaling about 1300 Android enabled devices. This brings to bear the issue of smartphone brands not having unique chips of their own.
Unlike Apple which produces its smartphone chip, Android smartphone companies have to rely on the chips they buy to produce their devices. Chinese smartphone maker Huawei successfully broke free from this chip dependence and for a time produced its original chips called the Kirin. While it was short-lived due to US sanctions, at its peak, the Kirin chips battled the greatest chips in the market at its time. The strength shown by the Kirin chip is a result of it being tailored to perfectly suit Huawei devices.
OPPO’s big step into producing their own smartphone chip
At the moment, Samsung is the only Android smartphone manufacturing company that produces a chip used on its devices. The Exynos chipset is Samsung’s in-house smartphone chip used as a variant on its devices. This means that the Exynos chip is not the only processor available on Samsung devices. Due to the shortcomings of the Exynos chipset, Samsung complements it with chips from Qualcomm across its high end devices.
OPPO will imitate Samsung and Huawei and produce its very own smartphone chip.
This is not the first time that OPPO will make such a move. The company sported its original MariSilicon X chip on the OPPO Find X5 series. The MariSilicon X is not a chip for general processing activities on a smartphone. It solely concerned itself with camera processing abilities to produce better images.
This new chip from OPPO however will launch sometime in 2023, and it’ll be an application chip. The chip is expected to aid apps usage and perform other activities more effectively than current OPPO smartphones.
With the right chip architecture, OPPO will no longer worry about purchasing mobile processing chips from the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek hence saving the company a lot of money. This move will also help to curb the issue of chip shortage that is currently plaguing the smartphone market. OPPO is stacking up lots of innovations, we can look forward to a more competitive smartphone market.