Ice Universe: Oppo is working on its own smartphone chipset

Smartphones are constrained by batteries and thermals, and perform best when specialized hardware does the heavy lifting — hardware like Oppo’s MariSilicon X ISP and the new MariSilicon Y Bluetooth chip. Of course these are partial solutions, a fully customized chipset is required for best results. This seems to be thinking at Oppo headquarters like Ice universe reports that the company is planning to introduce its own smartphone chipset in 2024.

Oppo has allegedly hired thousands of people to work on the project, but sadly further details are scarce for now. It will almost certainly be an ARM-based chip, which means it will use Cortex CPUs and Mali GPUs with MariSilicon designs that fit in for things like ISP and parts of the wireless connectivity.

The MariSilicon X ISP is made in TSMC’s 6nm foundries

It will be interesting to see who Oppo chooses as a partner in this venture. Google went with Samsung since designing an entire chipset from scratch is a cumbersome process even when using off-the-shelf pieces. But if Oppo’s team is really that big, a grassroots project isn’t out of the question.

Last year MediaTek announced the Dimensity 5G Open Resource Architecture and opened up its chipsets to customization by smartphone makers, although we haven’t seen anything as extensive as the Tensor chip.

A little over a year ago we saw a rumor that Oppo is interested in building a custom chipset based on TSMC’s 3nm node. The report at the time said that the first phones with the new silicon would arrive in 2023, but TSMC’s 3nm foundries have experienced some delays, which may have put a strain on those plans. For what it’s worth, the MariSilicon X chip is fabricated in TSMC’s 6nm foundries, so the two companies already have a working relationship.

We may be seeing a Cambrian explosion of custom chipsets: even Samsung Electronics would like to build a custom chip, separate from the Exynos chips supplied by its sister company Samsung System LSI. However, it doesn’t always work, Xiaomi tried it in 2017 with the Surge S1, but it faded quickly.