Xiaomi’s Soc Xring O1 is making a thunderous noise. His debut at the 15S Pro smartphone, the PAD 7 Ultra tablet and the Watch 4S clock is being preceded by performance figures that They place it ahead of the Snapdragon 8 elite of Qualcomm and Dimensity 9400 of Mediatek. He is not but that we are bad if we are in mind that he is the first flagship designed by Shanghai Xuanjie Technologies, the Xiaomi subsidiary specialized in the design of semiconductors.
However, in this article we will not investigate the performance of this chip or compare it with the alternatives proposed by Apple, Qualcomm or MediaTek. What I propose is that we verify how Xiaomi has achieved that the US Industrial and Security Office allows you to manufacture it in N3E (3 Nm) node of TSMC. This Chinese company is not included in the “blacklist” of the US, but this is only part of a story in which Xiaomi has proven to have a huge expertise.
TSMC lithography has a leading role in the performance of this chip
During the presentation of the soc Xring O1, Xiaomi revealed some details Very interesting about its architecture, and there is no doubt that ‘Xuanjie’ engineers have done a very good job in this area. However, Lei Jun, the founder and general director of this company, He recognized yesterday During the event that its purpose from the beginning was to put to tune a soc produced in the most advanced lithographic node available. And it is that a well -executed architecture and an avant -garde integration technology are the two ingredients that must necessarily intervene in the recipe of a flagship.
As I mentioned a few lines above, Xiaomi is not included in the “blacklist” of the US, but this condition is not enough to access the N3E node of TSMC, which is One of the most advanced in operation currently. This last company is from Taiwan, but both the machines of The Dutch company Asml which uses to manufacture its integrated circuits such as wafering processing techniques that they use incorporate American technologies. This is the circumstance that empowers the US when intervening in the ASML and TSMC business.
The US government decides who has access to its technologies even if they reside outside its borders
In this context, the US Industrial and Security Office of the US Commerce is responsible for controlling the export of US technologies that can be used for military purposes, and therefore, they have the ability to compromise national security and condition US foreign policy. All this means, in short, that the US government decides who has access to its technologies even if they reside outside their borders.
Xiaomi’s Soc Xring O1 is on the role as advanced as the best SOCs for smartphones that have Apple, Qualcomm or MediaTek and can be used for a very wide range of applications that go beyond their integration into a mobile phone or a tablet. In The current tension situation They hold the US and China it is surprising that TSMC has been able to manufacture this chip for xiaomi In one of its most advanced lithographic nodes. The interesting thing is that he could because the engineers of ‘Xuanjie’ have calibrated the design of their soc in such an ingenious way that they have managed to throw a very competitive performance without breaching the regulation of the US.
In this delicate balance lies the authentic merit of Xiaomi. In TSMC practice it has been able to manufacture it in its N3E node because the socket Xring O1 meets three fundamental conditions. The first of these is that it has been produced in Taiwan and not in any of the countries of Group D: 5, which are the nations to which the US considers a threat, such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Myanmar, Venezuela, China or Russia. In addition, this SOC incorporates 19,000 million transistors, so it is below the threshold of 30,000 million transistors.
If I had exceeded this TSMC limit, I could not have manufactured it for a Chinese company. The interesting thing in this area is that the engineers of ‘Xuanjie’ have managed to set up an architecture capable of delivering very competitive performance and efficiency using a relatively moderate number of transistors. The third and last condition that this Xiaomi chip meets is that it does not live with HBM memories (High Bandwidth Memory), which are the ones that work side by side with the GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI). We only have to have the opportunity to try it thoroughly in one of the Xiaomi devices that are going to bet on it to check if it is really up to the expectations it has generated.
Image | Xiaomi
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