Oppo To Start Making Their Own Chipsets? Company May Ditch Snapdragon And MediaTek In A Few Years

Many smartphone manufacturers have had to find innovative new solutions to deal with the heat and sometimes battery drain of some popular chips. In other cases, they had to develop special hardware so that designers could add features they wanted to include in smartphones.

Oppo will start producing its own chips - the company may abandon Snapdragon and MediaTek in a few years

For example, Oppo has developed the MariSilicon X ISP and the new MariSilicon Y Bluetooth chip for many unique features that they would like to have in their smartphones. This undoubtedly gave the folks at Oppo HQ the idea to develop their own chipsets and SoCs. The tech giant plans to launch its smartphone chip in 2024.

Oppo is said to have hired thousands of people to work on the project, but unfortunately no other details are known at the moment. It will almost certainly be an ARM-based chip, meaning it will use a Cortex CPU and a stock GPU with MariSilicon designs in place for the ISP components and wireless connectivity.

It will be interesting to see who Oppo chooses as a manufacturing partner in this company. Google chose Samsung when it decided to use its own SoCs because developing an entire chip from scratch is a complex process, even when using pre-engineered parts. But if the Oppo team is really that big, the basic design cannot be disputed.

Last year, MediaTek announced its open-source Dimensity 5G architecture and opened up its chip to customization by smartphone makers, though we haven't seen anything as massive as a Tensor chip.

A little over a year ago, we saw a rumor that Oppo was interested in developing a custom chip based on TSMC's 3nm node. Reports then claimed that the first phones using the new silicon would arrive in 2023, but TSMC's 3nm foundries saw delays that derailed those plans. For what it's worth, the MariSilicon X chip is made in TSMC's 6nm foundry, so the two companies do have a working relationship.

Even Samsung Electronics wants to develop a custom chip different from the Exynos chip offered by sister company Samsung System LSI. But this doesn't always work, Xiaomi tried it in 2017 with the Surge S1, which quickly broke.