There aren't many smartphone brands that make their own processors. Only Apple, Google, Huawei, and Samsung have been able to do that until now, and Xiaomi will soon join the race. The Chinese smartphone brand will launch its first flagship smartphone chip—Xring 01—later this month.

It will compete with Samsung's upcoming Exynos 2600 chip.

Last week, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun unveiled Xring 01, the company's first in-house flagship smartphone chip. Today, more information about that chip was revealed. It was developed using ARM's architecture and fabricated by TSMC on its second-generation 3nm process. Its performance is said to surpass the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is a lot better than what most people expected.

The Xring 01 was developed over the course of four years with a research and development cost of around $13.5 billion. The company's chip development team reportedly has more than 2,500 people. The chip is said to feature more than 19 billion transistors.

While the Xring 01 is Xiaomi's first flagship chip, it isn't its first in-house chip. Its first chip was the Surge S1, an entry-level chip that debuted in 2017 with the Mi 5C. The company then announced the Surge S2 at MWC 2018 and it was expected to debut with the Mi 6X. However, the plan was later dropped, and the Mi 6X used the Snapdragon 660.

Leaked benchmarks of the Xring 01 indicated that it scores 3,119 points in Geekbench 6's single-core CPU performance test and 9,673 points in the multi-core CPU performance test. That is as good as the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm's fastest chip.

It is faster than Samsung's Exynos 2400, which is a 4nm chip launched last year and is the South Korean firm's fastest smartphone chip ever released. It is a shame that Xiaomi has achieved what Samsung couldn't. Hopefully, Samsung launches a 3nm flagship chip next year for the Galaxy S26 series.

There were rumors that Samsung would launch the Exynos 2500, a 3nm smartphone chip, this year with the Galaxy S25. It was reportedly called the ‘Dream Chip' internally, but it didn't launch due to Samsung Foundry's poor 3nm yield. Now, it is rumored that the chip could debut with the Galaxy Z Flip 7 in July. However, it remains to be seen if that is true.