The decacore chip, rumoured to power the upcoming 15S Pro series, appears to be built on a 3nm-grade node from TSMC and features a CPU layout borrowed from a fever dream. We're talking two Cortex-X925 cores running at 3.9GHz, four Cortex-A725/X4s at 3.4GHz, two A720/A725s at 1.89GHz and two A520s chugging along at 1.8GHz.

It’s an odd blend, similar to Samsung’s Exynos 2400 Frankenstein layout. Most mobile SoCs are happy with eight cores and a neat hierarchy. Xiaomi seems to want to win multicore benchmarks by sheer volume.

In leaked Geekbench scores the XRing 01 managed 2,709 single-core and 8,125 multi-core. That’s solid, but not quite toppling the Dimensity 9400 yet, which keeps things simpler with a single Prime X925 core but better optimisation.

On the GPU side, Xiaomi’s going all in with Arm’s Immortalis G925-MC16. That’s 16 cores versus the 12-core version found in the Dimensity 9400. On paper that’s a 33 per cent jump in graphics brawn, although thermals and tuning will tell the real story.

The XRing 01 isn’t a complete chip yet. CPU and GPU aside, Xiaomi will need to sort its own modem, ISP, NPU and every other silicon bit Qualcomm currently feeds it. That’s no small task. Even Apple, the poster child for vertical integration, needed six years and a chip business acquisition to ditch Qualcomm’s modems and still has not completely pulled it off yet.

Xiaomi’s play mirrors what Huawei and Lenovo are doing, racing to shake off US supply chains and sanctions by investing in homegrown chips. Huawei’s latest Kirin X90 chips are already riding on SMIC’s sketchy 7nm process, and the Matebook Pro 2025 packs custom ‘Taishan’ cores.