Oppo is developing high-end mobile chipsets for its flagship smartphones. Reportedly (Via NIKKEI Asia), the reason behind this is to gain control over core components and reduce dependence on semiconductor suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek.
If information goes true, Oppo would be the latest major smartphone manufacturer to take control of its own SoC design. Two people who spoke to the newspaper said that the plan was to release custom SoCs in 2023 or 2024 “depending on the speed of development.”
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Yesterday Google launched the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, its first phones with a custom SoC called Tensor. Apple and Samsung also design their own smartphone chips, as did Huawei before US sanctions spun off their mobile business.
Oppo currently uses chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek like all other Chinese smartphone vendors since the crackdown on Huawei. Xiaomi designed and released a low-end SoC called the Surge S1 for its budget Mi 5C phone in 2017, but since then its chip design efforts have been limited to secondary components such as the image signal processor.
As Qualcomm laid bare in a salty Google sub-tweet last week, it will lose out if major companies like Oppo take on the SoC design itself. According to IDC, Oppo is the fourth-largest smartphone maker in the world, and it shares a supply chain and ownership with Vivo, Realme and OnePlus, chips developed by Oppo could quickly find their way into phones from multiple brands.
