Xiaomi will host one of the most important product announcements of the year on September 7. The company will host its autumn flagship event in China and reveal the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Pad 9 Pro Max. Both will be driven by the new in-house Xring O3 processora 3-nanometer chip that’s a significant leap for Xiaomi in retaining control over more of its own tech stack. The Xring O3 is at the center of the narrative. It is fabricated on TSMC’s 5nm process that features an all-big-core 10-core configuration culminating in clock speeds of 4.35 GHz. Xiaomi balances this processor with a 16-core G2-Ultra NX graphics block that the company claims yields 85% more efficaciousness and consumes 64% less energy than the preceding generation.
Initial benchmarks include an AnTuTu of over 5.2man unprecedented feat for a mobile chipand this chip is also the first tablate and mobile GPU to have LPDDR6 memory support, offering a significant leap in memory bandwidth over existing technologies. Xiaomi has even rolled this out with Chinese-produced LPDDR6 from ChangXin Memory Technologies, emphasizing the broader national drive for domestic hardware components. The Xiaomi 18 Fold marks a new design direction for the company’s foldable.
Moving away from the old Mix Fold line-up, it’s got a wider aspect ratio inward-folding form factor that Xiaomi is calling a mid-fold design. The larger inner display is an 89″ 2K+ AMOLED panel set up with multitasking and media use in mind, with improvements to hinge technology and durability (with reports of water resistance class IP68). The phone will run Xiaomi’s 26 user interface with full Ai on device features enabled by the Xring O3’s impressive neural processing power.
Battery capacity is assumed to be around 6,000 mAh with robust wired and wireless charging, but we’ll know for sure as the event unfolds. Next to the foldable is the Pad 9 Pro Max, Xiaomi’s most ambitious tablet to date. It has a13.3-inch screen, and is billed as a “desktop-class” device, rather than a “notebook-class” media slate.
Even in the results released so far for its Geekbench tests its multi-core scores look strong already, and the rumors have it with a 10,000 mAh+ battery, and 120-watt wired charging. Rumors also have it with 1 TB storage options, and being relatively light given its size. If has a big screen and powerful new chip, Xiaomi wants to be certain its first Pad 9 Pro Max “serious” tablet will be able to do it allproductivity, leisure and work.
These launches come at a time when Xiaomi is intentionally minimizing reliance on third-party silicon vendors. The company has depended on Qualcomm and MediaTek for years to supply high-end chips for its top devices. But the Xring O3 after the O2 indicates an ever-increasing trust in in-house silicon design. In making both the foldable phone and the sizeable tablet available at the same time with the same new silicon, Xiaomi was able to demonstrate it in various form factors and use cases. Naturally, actual performance, battery life and thermals will matter much, much more than benchmark slides. Users will also still demand assurances from foldables on durability, and tablets have to establish that they can actually supplant laptops for relevant task completion.
