OPPO, Vivo reportedly to launch their own chips soon

Following Xiaomi's launch of its in-house developed Surge C1 Image Signal Processing (ISP) chip, two other Chinese smartphone giants, OPPO and Vivo, will soon release their own ISP chips, Tencent News reported Tuesday.

In addition to ISP chips, OPPO and Vivo are also pushing ahead with plans to develop SOCs that could replace some Qualcomm and MediaTek chips in the future, the report said.

OPPO's chip team now has thousands of people, with core engineers from top-tier chip design companies including HiSilicon, MediaTek and Unisoc, headed by former MediaTek COO Zhu Shangzu, according to the report.

OPPO's chip project has been moving forward, with the first product being an ISP chip similar to the Xiaomi Surge C1, which will debut on the Find X4 series of phones to be launched early next year, the report said, citing an OPPO insider.

OPPO wants to enter the high-end market, and developing chips is definitely a marketing priority for the second half of this year and next year, the source said.

Compared to OPPO, Vivo is slightly more conservative in its own chip research, and the current chip team is much smaller than OPPO, the report said.

In September 2019 Vivo applied for the trademark "Vivo SOC" and "Vivo chip", covering a range of product categories including central processors, modems, computer chips, printed circuits and computer storage devices.

Vivo did start thinking about getting deeply involved in chip SOC design a year and a half ago, said Hu Baishan 2019, Vivo's executive vice president.

He said Vivo has launched a plan to recruit a large number of chip talents and proposed to build a chip team of 300-500 people in the future, but the team is not a pure chip R&D team, according to the report.

Vivo's first in-house developed chip will be launched soon, internally codenamed "Yueying", jiemian.com reported last Monday.

It is not clear what the chip's features are, and it may be a chip designed to improve imaging capabilities, the report said.