Oppo is the latest tech giant planning for its own chipset that will be part of the products in the coming years. New reports coming out this week suggests Oppo will announce its in-house chip in 2024. We have been hearing about Oppo’s chip plans for the past few years, so we would wait to see if this timeline checks out.
The development will surely come as a surprise for chip giants like Qualcomm and MediaTek who have been regular partners with Oppo for its smartphones over the years. And the prospect of an Oppo phone with a built-in chip is likely to generate excitement in the market.
Oppo has already brought a neural processing unit (NPU) and a connectivity chip as a part of the MariSilicon lineup, but having a system-on-chip (SoC) will be a gamechanger for the tech behemoth. The report from this mentions that the major chip design process has already been completed, which makes the 2024 timeline realistic for the company.
We’ve heard previous reports about Oppo banking on TSMC’s expertise to manufacture its chipset based on the 4nm architecture. We still don’t know the nature of the SoC to be produced, whether it will cater to devices in the high-end or the mid-range bracket. But the node process of the chip manufacturing strongly hints at a flagship product using the new hardware.
Using an in-house chipset also means better software-hardware integration for devices, something that has been hard to achieve for Android phone makers over the years.
And Oppo’s decision to go in-house with its hardware could directly be utilised for its other brands, most notably, OnePlus which is now part of the Oppo device ecosystem.
Apple and Samsung have been veterans in this department, with their A-series and Exynos SoC for mobile devices. Even Google entered the fray with the Tensor chip with the Pixel 6 series in 2021.