Xiaomi developing in-house Pinecone processors

Chinese device maker Xiaomi is best known for its smartphones, but the company's product portfolio also includes drones, electric scooter, TVs, laptops, accessories and more. For the past few months multiple reports have claimed that Xiaomi is getting into the hardware business, by making its own processor, and these reports have now been confirmed, by Wall Street Journal.

According to WSJ, Xiaomi will soon start making its own processor, and is planning to move away from Qualcomm (and MediaTek) as its primary chip provider. If Xiaomi starts building its own processor, it will join the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei who design chips in-house for their smartphones.

The report citing sources says that Xiaomi's processor is codenamed Pinecone and could be used in its upcoming flagship, the Mi 6, which is rumored to release sometime in March. The new processor is a result of Xiaomi's partnership with chip maker Leadcore Technology.

According to latest rumors there will be at least two different Pinecone chipsets carrying model number V670 and V970. The V670 is a mid-range chip built using  28nm manufacturing process, and will be an octa-core processor with large 4 x Cortex A-53 cores and 4 x small Cortex A53 cores. It will pack Mali T860 GPU.

The V970 will be a high performance octa-core chip with 4 x Cortex A73 cores and 4 x Cortex A53 cores. It will have a maximum clock speed of 2.7GHz, and the GPU on-board is Mali G71 MP12. It is rumored to be manufactured using the same 10nm process as the Snapdragon 835 chip. 

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