Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded

This is still an ARM C1-Ultra. Same one used in Mediatek dimensity 9500, which also got more than 4000 points in GB6 lab test. But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300.

But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.

This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.

Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.

Missing the most important metric: processing power per watt.

I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.

It is pretty amazing the creativity with compute architecture which is afforded by a zillion transistors.

M5 (iPad) AnTuTu: 3.5 million

XRing O3 AnTuTu: 5.5 million

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M5 iPad Geekbench Single-Core: 3,556

M5 Max Geekbench Single-Core: 4,300

XRing O3 Geekbench Single-Core: 3,945

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M5 iPad Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,285

M5 Max Geekbench Multi-Core: 29,200

XRing O3 Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,221

Suspiciously ignored is power consumption. That’s the biggest and most useful metric often ignored because it’s less flashy than speed.

"matches" could've also been written as "this year's product falls short of the competitor's last year one".

And multithreaded is 10 cores vs 6 cores.

I appreciate Apple being kept on their feet, but they're not dethroned yet.

This is nothing. China is about to start doing their own 5nm. When they roll out their own silicon at scale, I don't think there's catching up, nobody can match their manufacturing capabilities. Not even close.

I'm curious as to the performance per watt. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Xiaomi also make amazing cars.

"WSJ

I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/chinese-ev-test-drive...

"

I love this, really, competition on a global scale is good for us, bad for greedy US corporations.

For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)

“…of course, Apple may soon announce their next processor”

I’m pretty sure they will, as they have, like clockwork, in the same month, for over a decade.

Anyone can make a fast CPU, but is it also a safe and secure CPU? Or does it have architectural defects as a consequence of the race to be fast?

See eg LoongLeak and the Loongson processor: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentat...

The GPU performance is insane too, approaches M5 results at ~20W.

Of course it will be in Android phones so it will be throttle hard past 4W and will have terrible drivers.

I wish phones moved to HPB packaging and active cooling so we could have sustained 10W and use them as light workstations.

Where is this being fabbed TSMC? How advanced a process node CPU maker has access to is usually all you need to predict relative performance.

(as long as you take similar assumptions in die size, advanced packaging and power envelope).

Geekerwan's review is up, with caveat that this is the prototype board, not even packaged into a phone yet, but still shows some amazing results in spec 2026, 3dmark (gpu), perf-per-watt for single core and multi-core https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8 (you can turn on YouTube auto-dub)

Yay free markets China makes a fast chip Yay national security

44mb of cache really highlights the bottleneck of how raw compute is cheap, but the real limit is memory latency.

"Let's isolate China's semiconductor industry," they said.

"This will all turn out well," they said.

PRC going to get have surplus of semi talent and equipment in a few years that food delivery companies Meituan probably going to starting making chips like they do LLMs. Only 60% joking.

I think it's great that the Chinese are catching up and can compete directly with the incumbents. The GPU space I find really exciting with several new IPs out there that aren't quite ready for primetime, but still fascinating.

Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.

As usual with claims from China based companies. It's pure lies until we have an independent test with free access.

Two rather rare words in China

Good, get this qualcomm garbage out of here

How is this news worthy? The cores are off the shelf C1-Ultra. Even Google got them in the new pixel.

Xiaomi still need to improve their UX and also match the UI to western culture, in spite of now being a global "tech giant" they still want to convince everyone else to be Chinese?

Apple is the least interesting company to compare against. They are in their own MacOS/iOS software ecosystem, which you want if you want and you don’t if you don’t. Not to be dismissive of either side of that, there are legit reasons to stay in or out of Apple’s ecosystem. But benchmarking points is not a reason anyone would switch operating systems, right?

What OS will these chips run and what is the competition on that platform? He makes a lot of comparisons to AMD and Intel in the post, why not benchmark against them?

RIP Mediatek, RIP Qualcomm

Would be nice to see some independent numbers and benchmarks. Apparently, Xiaomi announced this SoC today, so there's no 3rd party data about it.

Yeah but they can't use TSMC to make it so they'll have to make due with older or more expensive lithography processes.

That probably explains why there's so few of these CPUs around: the yields of the domestic Chinese lithography processes (non-EUV) are awful.

Nice. Let's see if they perform well in the real world.

Interesting how quickly they seem to have caught up.

If Moore's law is truly ending as is generally believed, then it seems logically inevitable that the entire industry will flatten out and equalize. Or, I am oversimplifying something.

Good. Competition is great for consumers.

I think constraint creates the best innovation, the US is shooting itself in the foot by forcing China to innovate.

ok but power consumption??

can't wait to see Xiaomi enter the GPUs market and beats Nvidia

Thank you OP for using xcancel.

I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0

No mention I can see of power consumption multiple compared to apple's chips at matching perf. My guess is 2x-5x

LPDDR6... that's not enough for speedy inference

US Government - China is a security risk & they will steal our data. We should ban xiaomi for national security risk. We found the phone collecting telemetry..... just like google and apple.

This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers — around *3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core* — are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.

But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?

This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.

2020's US geopolitical doctrine:

1) Pick a historically extremely innovative and disciplined culture which also happens to have massive human capital

2) Please arbitrary artificial ill-thought-out economic constraints on them

3) wait a while

4) get a bunch of magnificent spanking in return (AI, chips, etc...)

Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.

Insane if true. Does Xiaomi sell laptops?

good. competition is good. we, the consumers, win.

the a20pro and what not will match or beat it and the cycle will continue.

if this chip turns into a decent desktop chip then arm linux laptops might be very nice.

Great, now they can put much more Ads in my notes app...

"Arm-designed CPU core matches Apple-designed CPU core from a year ago"

I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.

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Is AI helping to improve chip design?

Sad thing is that it'll still be running the damn Android and so JVM not C or Swift on the machine.

Apple's *Last Year* CPUs. We're literally about to get a new chip in 2-3 weeks from them.

This site is just crazy pro-china now. Guess that happens when non-westerners dominate online, sadly.

It is the same Xiaomi which announced 300 000 SU7 vehicles sold in a day and 6 months later reported they are struggling to hit their sales targets? Just don’t believe anything a Chinese company say, divide it by at least 2. I have nothing against China, this is a cultural thing which you should be aware reading anything coming from the country.