Xiaomi's first fully in-house flagship chip just cracked a number no phone processor had touched before. The Xring O3, unveiled on August 24, 2026, posted 5.22 million points on AnTuTu, the first mobile SoC ever to clear the 5-million mark, and it's already shipping inside the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max as of this September.

  • Built on TSMC's 3nm process, the Xring O3 packs 24 billion transistors onto a die measuring just 133 square millimeters, with a 10-core Arm C1 CPU, a 16-core "G2-Ultra NX" GPU, and a 4-core NPU rated at 200 TOPS.
  • It scored 5.22 million on AnTuTu, the first chip to pass 5 million, and hit 3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core on Geekbench 6.5.
  • Xiaomi claims roughly 60% higher multi-core performance than its predecessor while actually reducing power consumption.
  • The chip has entered mass production, according to CRN Asia, and marks Xiaomi's clearest step yet toward independence from Qualcomm.

What Xiaomi actually put inside the Xring O3

Xiaomi's chip design unit built the O3 on TSMC's 3-nanometer process, cramming 24 billion transistors onto a die that measures just 133 square millimeters. That is a dense amount of silicon for something that has to fit inside a folding phone. The CPU is a 10-core Arm C1 design, paired with a 16-core GPU Xiaomi calls the G2-Ultra NX, plus a 4-core neural processing unit rated at 200 TOPS. Memory support moved to LPDDR6, with 113.8 GB/s of bandwidth on tap, backed by a 60MB cache pool. Peak clock speed lands at 4.35 GHz. None of these figures mean much in isolation. They are the ingredients behind the benchmark numbers everyone is actually talking about.

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How did the Xring O3 break the 5 million AnTuTu barrier?

AnTuTu's combined score rolls CPU, GPU, memory, and general user-experience tests into one number, and no phone chip had ever pushed that composite past 5 million points before this one. The Xring O3 landed at 5.22 million, per benchmark runs cited by Gizmochina and AICybr. Geekbench 6.5, which isolates raw CPU throughput rather than blending it with graphics and memory performance, put the chip at 3,945 points single-core and 15,221 multi-core. Xiaomi's own comparison claims about 60% higher multi-core performance than the O2 generation, and the company says that jump arrived alongside lower power draw, not more of it. More performance per watt is usually the harder trick to pull off than raw speed on its own, and it is the part of this story worth taking seriously.

Xring O3 AnTuTu score versus previous-generation flagship siliconHorizontal bar chart showing Xiaomi's Xring O3 at 5.22 million combined AnTuTu points, the first mobile chip to pass 5 million, next to a shorter grey bar representing typical previous-generation flagship chips that stayed under the 5 million mark.ANTUTU V10 . COMBINED SCOREFirst mobile chip past 5 million pointsXiaomi Xring O35.22MPrevious-gen flagship siliconsub-5MXiaomi says the O3 is the first mobile SoC to clear a combined AnTuTu score of 5 million.genztech.blog
Fig 1 The Xring O3's 5.22 million AnTuTu score is the first time any mobile chip has cleared the 5-million-point mark on the combined benchmark.

Why 3nm and custom cores actually matter here

The move to TSMC's 3nm process is what makes the rest of the spec sheet possible. Shrinking the transistor node lets Xiaomi pack more compute into that same 133mm² of die space, which is how a 10-core CPU, a 16-core GPU, and a dedicated 200 TOPS NPU all fit without the chip turning into a space heater. Using Arm's C1 core family and its own G2-Ultra NX graphics block also lets Xiaomi tune the design around its own software stack, rather than working around whatever Qualcomm or MediaTek happened to ship that year. LPDDR6 memory and a 60MB cache pool matter for a similar reason. Modern phone workloads, camera processing, on-device AI, sustained gaming, are as memory-bound as they are compute-bound, and wider, faster memory access shows up directly in how a phone actually feels to use, not just in a synthetic score.

Why does this matter for Qualcomm?

Xiaomi has bought Qualcomm silicon for its flagship line for years, the same way most Android makers still do. The Xring O3, following the earlier O1 and O2 chips, is the clearest signal yet that Xiaomi wants that dependence to shrink. Apple made the same bet with the A-series over a decade ago. Google did it with Tensor. Xiaomi is now following the same logic: owning the chip lets a company tune hardware and software together in ways a merchant silicon vendor cannot match, and Xiaomi's phone volume, among the largest in the world, is big enough to justify the enormous cost of building custom silicon in-house. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite line and MediaTek's Dimensity chips remain the benchmark that most of the Android market gets measured against, and neither company is going anywhere soon. But every Xring chip inside a Xiaomi phone is a sale Qualcomm does not get, and at Xiaomi's scale that math adds up fast.

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Xring O3Qualcomm / MediaTek flagship silicon
Process nodeTSMC 3nmAlso built on leading-edge nodes, varies by generation
Transistor count24 billionNot independently disclosed per chip
CPU10-core Arm C1Arm-based, core counts vary by vendor and generation
NPU4-core, 200 TOPSDedicated on-device NPUs standard on current flagships
AnTuTu combined score5.22 million, first past 5MHistorically reported under 5 million
MemoryLPDDR6, 113.8 GB/sTypically LPDDR5X on current-generation chips

Who else is affected, and what comes next?

The immediate winners are buyers of the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, the first two devices shipping with the O3 starting this September. CRN Asia reports the chip has already entered mass production, which suggests Xiaomi plans to spread it across more of its lineup rather than treat it as a one-device showpiece. What is less clear is how far outside China this chip actually travels. Xiaomi's global phone business leans heavily on Qualcomm-equipped variants for markets like Europe, India, and Latin America, and there is no confirmation yet that Xring-powered models will reach every market where the Xiaomi 18 Fold eventually launches. That is the detail worth watching over the next few months: whether the O3 stays a China-first showcase chip, or Xiaomi starts trusting it in phones sold globally.

What to watch
  • International rollout. Whether Xring O3 devices reach markets outside China, or remain a domestic-only chip.
  • Sustained performance. Whether the AnTuTu peak holds up under real thermal loads over long sessions, not just short benchmark runs.
  • Qualcomm's response. Whether this pushes Qualcomm toward different pricing or feature terms in future Xiaomi negotiations.
  • The next chip. Whether Xiaomi keeps this annual cadence and pushes an Xring O4 further into its own phone lineup next year.

Our take

Breaking 5 million on AnTuTu is a genuinely new number, and Xiaomi has earned the right to make noise about it. But one flagship benchmark run does not prove a company can sustain a chip business the way Apple has for more than a decade. Silicon design at this level is brutally expensive, and mistakes compound over time: yields, thermal behavior across an entire product line, driver support across years of software updates. The O3 shows Xiaomi's engineering team can build something genuinely competitive on a leading-edge node. It does not yet show that Xiaomi can do that every year, at scale, across every price tier it sells phones at. The real test for this chip is not this launch. It is the O4, the O5, and whether Xiaomi ever trusts this silicon in a phone sold outside its home market.

Primary sources

Original analysis by GenZTech Team. Sources linked above.