Smartphone brands upgrade chips for sound, gaming and photography

Credit: Ti Gong

Caption: OPPO releases a new in-house developed chip on Wednesday.

Chinese smartphone brands are upgrading chips for optimized sound, eSports and photography features, helping them differentiate from rivals to woo consumers.

OPPO, the No.3 player in the domestic market, released its second in-house developed chip MariSilicon Y for Bluetooth lossless music and AI-powered sound effects. It will be adopted in OPPO's smartphones and devices to hit the market soon, the company said on Wednesday.

The MariSilicon Y features the world's fastest 12Mbps Bluetooth wireless transmission for lossless audio and provides AI algorithms for a more personalized listening experience on the headphone side. Before that, OPPO released an NPU (neural processing unit) chip called MariSilicon X for improved photography and AI function.

"In the next decade, smartphone will remain a centric intelligent device in daily life. Chip is the basic part of intelligence," Liu Chang, OPPO's vice president, told the OPPO INNO Day conference held today.

Also recently, chip designer MediaTek released Dimensity 8200 with gaming optimizations.

It features a 4 nanometer-class chip production process with higher power efficiency; clock speeds exceeding 3GHz and a special graphics engine to ensure gamers "enjoy smooth high-frame rate game play experiences."

It touches a huge user base in China with about 660 million mobile game users.

Credit: Ti Gong

Caption: iQOO 11, with gaming optimizations, has become an official smartphone for KPL, the professional eSports league for the Honor of Kings, China's most popular mobile game.

The iQOO Neo7 SE is the world's first smartphone with MediaTek's Dimensity 8200, featuring gaming optimization and a cooling system.

iQOO is a sub-brand of Vivo, the top brand in the Chinese market. It also released iQOO 11 recently as its flagship eSports model to "define the eSports phone standard for 2023."

It features Snapgdragon 8 Gen 2 and Vivo's in-house developed chip V2 for photography optimization. Besides chip enhancement, it offers a high refresh rate 2K screen, a big capacity battery and super-fast charging technology to fully charge within 10 minutes.

iQOO 11 has become an official smartphone for KPL, the professional eSports league for the Honor of Kings, China's most popular mobile game.