Xiaomi founder, chairman and chief executive Lei Jun has long admired Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. When Lei began promoting Xiaomi smartphones more than a decade ago, he was seen on stage in black shirts and blue jeans, the signature outfit for the late Jobs when he introduced new Apple products. Xiaomi’s phones were even called out for looking a bit too much like iPhones. But now Lei, 55, has taken his admiration to new – and very expensive – heights, with his own version of the “Apple Silicon” strategy. Under CEO Tim Cook, Apple stopped buying off-the-shelf processor chips and brought the design work in-house. This differentiated its products and created a high barrier to entry. This week, Lei revealed success in his “Xiaomi Silicon” strategy. Designing its own chips isn’t new for Xiaomi, as it started doing that back in 2017, but there had been problems and challenges along the way. At an event in Beijing on Thursday, Xiaomi unveiled its new XRing O1 integrated circuit designed to power the company’s next-generation smartphones and tablets. Using an advanced 3-nanometre lithography process enabled Xiaomi to pack 19 billion transistors on the chip, giving it a density on par with Apple’s A18 series. “Chips [represent] a key race for us to make breakthroughs in hardcore technology,” Lei said in a Weibo post earlier in the week. Xiaomi did not reveal its foundry partner for the XRing O1, but we can deduce one thing; it was not fabricated in China. That’s because the country’s leading chip foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), is not able to produce 3-nm chips – at least not in volume and cost effectively – due to US national security sanctions that restrict its access to the most advanced chip-making gear. There are only two foundries in the world capable of 3-nm mass production – South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – so it has to be one or the other. Unlike domestic smartphone rival Huawei Technologies – which also designs its own processors – Xiaomi is not under US sanctions so is able to use foreign foundry partners like Samsung or TSMC. Xiaomi is only the fourth company in the world to design a 3-nm smartphone chip after Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek. According to third-party chip benchmarking platform GeekBench, the XRing O1’s results in single-core and multi-core tests place it among the world’s top-performing phone chips, rivalling Apple and Qualcomm. In another post on Weibo, Lei wrote that Xiaomi achieved the milestone after spending 13.5 billion yuan (US$1.87 billion) and deploying 2,500 research-and-development (R&D) staff to work on its XRing O1 chip. Lei recounted Xiaomi’s difficulties during the development of its first phone processor, called the Surge S1. Launched in 2017, it reportedly failed in the market because of its weak baseband capabilities, making it less efficient when transferring data over networks. Lei said semiconductors represented “a summit that has to be ascended and a fight that has to be fought” to reach the company’s goal. Separately, a report ranking the top consumer brands in China put Apple at the top, with a 100-point score, followed by Huawei and Xiaomi with scores of 95.3 and 95.1, respectively. https://www.scmp.com/tech.. #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 #