This is still an ARM C1-Ultra. Same one used in Mediatek dimensity 9500, which also got more than 4000 points in GB6 lab test. But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300.
But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.
Yes and no. Having more competition in the space is excellent news. However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding as most other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country.
I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
When we buy software from Silicon Valley or a nice Mercedes Benz from Germany we don’t use this same language “outsourcing.”
Colloquially, outsourcing implies low quality or cheap price. No, what’s happening here is that China makes the best products in numerous categories and we are choosing to import them, because the best products are the most desirable.
Well at this point they are probably the only country in the world that can produce a car end to end starting from the raw iron ore and other elements up to the chips and software that runs on them (I’m sure they will still need to import some small stuff probably like Rhodium or Iridium maybe), who is going to compete with that? Everything done in country, no tariffs at all throughout the entire production cycle.
That said some of these industry especially metallurgical ones will never return to Europe or US as they basically destroy and pollute the environment on a large scale, in China that still seems acceptable but also might change promoting them to outsource to other countries which they already do in some areas I think.
Fair point. Outsourcing was not the right word to use, China today makes products over all quality ranges and almost always they are cheaper than any other alternative. “Giving away” would be a better word.
I think it’s a matter of perceptions catching up to reality. 15 years ago China was definitely still ripping off american products down to the english silk screening.
China didn't get that way by magic. They ran the same playbook that allowed Alexander Hamilton to snatch manufacturing from Great Britain to the US, and the US gave up manufacturing for the same reason the UK gave up manufacturing (suppression of labor interests).
It will be interesting to see what China does. They aren't ideologically committed to exclusively serving the interests of the wealthy, but they still have lots of rich people in the (ahem) Communist Party, so who knows.
Countries and institutions should always produce things where they are excellent at producing, in forms of specialization and compete in terms of comparative advantages.
Yes, and no. Yes because you are vulnerable to supply chain disruption by illwilled countries. But illwilled countries that disrupt supply chains greatly incentivise others to diversify supply away from them.
China could have the monopoly of rare earth production and refinery for all of eternity. But because of their reaction towards all the us allies when the us increased tariffs, I don't expect them to be relevant enough to disrupt markets with rare earths sanctions in 10-20 years.
I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy
It's not reversing, it's continuing the trend of more and more manufacturing moving to Chinese companies. It already happened to TVs and it's currently happening with RAM.
Xiaomi may manufacture their chips in Taiwan (by tsmc) but Xiaomi is still a Chinese hardware company, similar to how Apple or Qualcomm are US American hardware companies.
No. The problem is that TSMCs new capacity is already hogged by AI peddlers for years to come (in fact, AI BS is the reason why these new non-Taiwanese fabs got the massive US and EU subsidies), and so everyone else not flush with cash from the AI hypetrain has no alternative than to go to China - and deliver all their secrets to the CCP.
And eventually, just like the Western solar, battery, pharma and car companies all have learned, the CCP will use that knowledge to surpass and undercut everyone else.
This is so stupid. China itself uses the "dominate and corral" model for their industries, and had severe tariffs to grow their various industrial bases, such as automotive.
I wouldn't be surprised if Xiaomi intend to use this for their laptops with Windows 11 once the software ecosystem matures. Which both ARM and Qualcomm are working on. But I still believe in terms of PC usage it is all going to be Nvidia.
They do allow to unlock their bootloaders, which is rather rare, which in turn allows to run Linux. Seeing as Chins just migrates their entire administration to Linux, it's not far fetched to assume they'll support Linux on their laptops very soon.
Kafka himself would be proud if their unlocking process[0], but technically sure, they allow it
> Press "Apply for unlocking" at exactly 12:00 AM GMT+8 (pressing it too late will cause the "application quota limit reached" error. Use this website to check the time)
"Account Error" might show up. If that happens, retry after 10 days
Missing the most important metric: processing power per watt.
I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.
> I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs
In multicore, sure. In most single threaded workloads as well? That'd be interesting enough on its own, regardless of wattage (though that'd make it even more interesting), as my A19 device gives my overclocked 9800X3D a run for its money (and some losses) in single threaded workloads and that's the only thing the 9800X3D is really targeting.
Even aside from battery life, high TDP means thermal throttling under sustained load. Which most of these benchmarks don't really test, or if they did, you could stick it in a freezer.
This is nothing. China is about to start doing their own 5nm. When they roll out their own silicon at scale, I don't think there's catching up, nobody can match their manufacturing capabilities. Not even close.
They are already doing 5nm with multi-patterning DUV. But that's not the same as EUV machines. It is not nearly the same scale of production (with yields as low as 20%). They are still a few years away from indigenous EUV. Though I have to admit the shenzhen breakthrough was pretty impressive
I love this, really, competition on a global scale is good for us, bad for greedy US corporations.
For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)
Do you still believe this considering those companies live and die by the CCP? Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
I'm right there with you questioning Meta's value for society, but I do believe it has less opportunity for abuse/manipulation
I don't care about internal politics of a state, as long as they are not killing people deliberately on a daily basis or invading other countries and killing their people.
How government is structured is up to Chinese people to decide
> Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
It's not only about scale and upstart, it's also about how much are they harming society.
When you say "greedy US corporations" do you mean that these US corporations are uniquely greedy, or that all corporations are greedy, and this is bad for the ones in the US? Do you think that corporations in China, which in many cases are subsidized by the government, are also greedy?
I'm also interested in the security features of this new CPU. Where doesn't it sit compared to Apple and ARM (Qualcomm, Titan)?
Modern processor without memory tagging for example is a little..... dated, given how much the new AIs accelerated the vulnerability discovery in all the apps and system components.
China is nowhere near “free market”. Their EV sector received more government subsidies in the last 15 years than the entire U.S. automobile market since inception. The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.
250 billion in EV subsidies from China. 10 billion by the U.S.
That journalist may not want to buy American cars, but thanks to our enlightened government, they must buy American cars, since everything else is taxed significantly or banned altogether. Free market for all! /s
Apple is the least interesting company to compare against. They are in their own MacOS/iOS software ecosystem, which you want if you want and you don’t if you don’t. Not to be dismissive of either side of that, there are legit reasons to stay in or out of Apple’s ecosystem. But benchmarking points is not a reason anyone would switch operating systems, right?
What OS will these chips run and what is the competition on that platform? He makes a lot of comparisons to AMD and Intel in the post, why not benchmark against them?
Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.
If Moore's law is truly ending as is generally believed, then it seems logically inevitable that the entire industry will flatten out and equalize. Or, I am oversimplifying something.
Xiaomi still need to improve their UX and also match the UI to western culture, in spite of now being a global "tech giant" they still want to convince everyone else to be Chinese?
I think it's great that the Chinese are catching up and can compete directly with the incumbents. The GPU space I find really exciting with several new IPs out there that aren't quite ready for primetime, but still fascinating.
Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.
Xiaomi has not been sanctioned like Huawei. So it is made by TSMC on N3P.
The Huawei chips, made by SMIC, are so far behind they're not competitive at all with even Xiaomi's first generation chip.
The U.S. is already making moves to completely halt the export of ASML machines to China, including non-EUV ones. Every semiconductor China produces could be used in weapons and that's agains U.S. law.
This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers — around *3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core* — are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.
> The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.
Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
> Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.
Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).
All 10 cores support the same extensions. It’s silly to implement an SoC any other way, and it’s been a decade since someone has last made that mistake.
It will be interesting to find out the details. From the block diagram, the core only issues 10 instructions per cycle, so not especially wide. Maybe the performance will be worse once in a real phone in real thermal conditions, but if that's true, it could make for a very interesting laptop or desktop chip. Time will tell.
The C1-ultra has a decode of 10 instructions but can issue up to 23 uop per cycle, that’s a good bit wider than any other CPU. In particular, I believe it’s the first CPU to have a 4th load pipeline.
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can.
From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)
I think they might be saying that there's still no supported way to build a native-code app on the Android OS. It could be construed as a plea to make that happen in order to unlock greater performance, not necessarily a desire to have a DIY Linux-based OS option.
Ignoring the native vs java runtime interface application difference between Android and iOS, which the top poster was was referencing.
Your Linux phone statement is a fallacy.
Ask FuriLabs how many of their phones they have sold.[0] High confident it is more than 10.
FuriLabs moved their batman, battery monitoring application, from Python to C and it really improved performance. Native applications really do keep resource usage low and is beneficial.
I believe the comparison is with iOS not Linux. Android is Linux after all. It’s just that most programs don’t get to run a that level of abstraction, and instead run on top of a jvm. At least in iOS the code does seem to be able to be more efficient due to to higher usage of natively compiled code, which is what I think the op was complaining about.
There's no JVM in Android. Most important parts of an Android app are compiled ahead of time into CPU machine code, rarely used parts are compiled into machine code in runtime using JIT.
US Government - China is a security risk & they will steal our data. We should ban xiaomi for national security risk. We found the phone collecting telemetry..... just like google and apple.
It depends on the number of channels. The Xring O3 appears to have 4×24-bit channels, so 113.8 GB/s. The iPhone 17 Pro's memory bandwidth is ~76.8 GB/s. Seems fine?
If I recall correctly, Strix Halo gets about 450G/s. The M series processors get between 400 and 800G/s, and an actual NVIDIA card is like 5.5T/s. 113G/s is pretty slow for inference.
Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.
Yes it is. I've bought a MacBook air despite despising MacOS (with the hope that Asahi support will come eventually) because the processor currently has no competition.
I don't like Apple as a company or how they act around locking people out of the devices they buy.
I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.
So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.
Why would we compare it to an 8-year-old design? For browsing, the current MBP smokes the MBN, by margins of roughly one-third. It is a significant and noticeable regression. For sustained workloads like software development or even running the MacOS updates, it is a huge and glaring regression. But it's still good kit.
It's an ARM-designed CPU core, made in Taiwan. Very little difference from say MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity SoC just announced earlier because it is made on TSMC N3P instead of N2.
This thread is the perfect example of useful idiots with astroturfing. This is a CPU core designed by UK company (and owned by Japanese) made in Taiwan on equipment made in EU (with non trivial USA components). Xiaomi here is the easiest to replace in this chain (and the Chinese have very much tried to replace any of the others, failing for now). Yet they are angling for a huge PR win.
ARM is merely an IP portfolio licensing company. They don't really design or build anything. And everyone uses TSMC (who uses ASML). The primary design is still being done by Xiaomi, that's the most unique part of this build.
Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.
Really?! Did you read the announcement? C1 ultra cores are designed by ARM.
>The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.
Xiaomi has made the XRING 03 boast a larger die size than the XRING 01,
measuring 133mm² compared to its predecessor’s 109mm² dimensions This change
was deemed necessary as the flagship SoC features 16MB of SLC cache, not to
mention a new “6 + 4” CPU cluster that comprises two ARM C1-Ultra cores
running at 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores operating at 3.68GHz and lastly,
four C1-Pro cores running at 3.15GHz. [1]
Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.
If "China" decides it doesn't like me, my life really isn't going to change much. If my electric company decides it doesn't like me, I'm in big trouble.
Yeah, I don't want China as an adversary. It appears to me that it is a country full of fun, smart and interesting people. And their manufacturing prowess is incredible.
I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!
You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9], bribe your politicians [10], censor your media [11], universities [12,13,14], advertising and corporations in general [15,16], and even books [17].
While they plan 50 years ahead, we are stuck re-litigating the most basic "united we stand, divided we fall" logic, even while the consequences are all around us. But congratulations on your enlightened individualism.
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[13] Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, says that [..] American scholars practice self-censorship about China and adopt the official narrative of the Chinese regime when talking about sensitive issues. “We don’t talk about ‘Taiwan independence.’ We talk about ‘the cross-Strait relations.’ We don’t talk about ‘the occupation of Tibet.’ We don’t call the June 4th Massacre ‘massacre.’ - https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-american-academy-misle...
[15] Leica Camera has sought to distance itself from a promotional video depicting photographers covering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown three decades ago, after it landed the German company in hot water in China. - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...
Edit as reply ("posting too fast", thanks HN) to all the "but the US also does bad things" "counterarguments":
> Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
I'm European, and not stupid enough to believe that because the US is acting poorly or even in some cases hostile to Europe (to say nothing of the Middle East or South America), that we should roll over and allow China to subjugate us instead. Neither should the US. This is "you are not pure and innocent enough for self-defense" logic. Please don't drag the rest of us down in some deluded attempt at atonement.
> You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].
All of South America already feels that way about the USA. Add the EU if we include the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard.
Sadly Colombia just elected a US citizen as the new president. The "subordinate receivers of orders" status has been achieved.
Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity. I do not see anything wrong with that.
Secret police in Canada and stuff like this - yes go ahead nail them and kick those out of the country. Has nothing to do with the trade.
> Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity.
No, the GP's comment is an attempt to correct the mistake you were so kind to outline. There's no reason we must stick with the approach set by a previous set of leaders who turned out to be short-signed and naive, and course corrections start with outlining the problems and contradictions of the present course.
>[1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].
As a Canadian, I am going to be honest and say that I thought at first you were describing the United States of 2026.
I mean, we have a much better opinion of China. As does almost the entire world. For extremely good reason.
There is one country bombing endless nations, stealing resources, engaging in sea piracy, undermining democracies, trying to destroy the West, and so on, and it is the United States of America under a juvenile halfwit self-dealing shitbag pedophile, working on behalf of an utterly deranged group of kleptocrats.
Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
> I don't personally consider "China" my adversary
They're not an adversary in the same way that a guy demanding your wallet at knifepoint is, or a company able to cut off your electricity is.
China is an adversary in the sense that they're a totalitarian government, who, by the nature of that system, cannot brook any sort of opposition to their ideology, plans, or desires. All within the state, none without. That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time because doing so will suggest that the powers-that-be in China might not have all of the answers to the human condition. Either you fall in line, or you have to be eliminated.
If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Instead of railing about ideology, try comparing the actions of the U.S. and China over the past 20 years. The U.S. has been far more interventionist and aggressive; China appears to be maturing and the U.S. is regressing.
An "adversary" can also just be a country we're in competition with. Both America and China are in competition for the global leader. Adversary could be akin to friendly competition if we all wanted to operate this way.
> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time
When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.
This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.
> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time
How in the world is the USA existing with other systems then? By taking it all over with force and subterfuge? It is obvious to those with eyes that China, despite being "totalitarian" has been the better actor (compared to the USA) on the world stage for decades now.
> If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Yea, because Americans are fucking violent jerks and can only get what they want through threats and intimidation.
If you were able to determine in 5 seconds whether or not a person was a violent jerk, it would take you ~28 years of around-the-clock meetings to assess >= 50% of the current U.S. population, thereby rendering this comment meaningful and true. If you needed a whopping 30 seconds, it would take ~166 years. Better get cracking!
But as a Brit. America, our supposed ally is slapping tarriffs on us, and threatening our actual allies. China not so much. So which are our adversaries?
In recent history, we performed dozens of violent coups and destroyed countries in the name of overthrowing communist regimes.
China has a totalitarian government, but it's existing more in harmony with the world than the US government has for all of my life, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese government will conflict with other countries while in the same breath implying the US government is better.
> Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.
I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Myopically individualistic perspectives, focused on your individual wants and day-to-day experiences, miss a lot of stuff.
> I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Nobody in Ukraine who wasn't already explicitly pro-Russian thought that in 2013, did they? Russia-aligned individuals poisoned the third president of Ukraine during his presidential campaign, very likely with direct assistance. You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
> You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
You're being too literal. I'm sure Ukrainians weren't actually so stupid as many Americans can be.
My point is you could transplant that logic (elevate individual, myopic interests and gripes; lose sight of the community you're part of), into a situation that we've already seen play out (Ukraine v. Russia).
> China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.
My whole point is that looking at it from the perspective of the "daily life of individual Americans" is the wrong one.
Also, while no two situations are going to be exactly the same, I think it's false to say "China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans." It'd be happy to turn the US into a weak, low-tech country whose only exports are agriculture and natural resources. I can't find it right now, but I've read a quote from some high-level Chinese official to that effect.
If you are an American company US backdoors are annoying but hard to avoid given the government will find ways to compell access anyway. Adding potential avoidable foreign back doors does not improve your security.
I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.
Exactly. This is not a question of whether you get spied on, it is a question of who gets the monopoly for spying on you. Between extortion groups, cybercrime syndicates, foreign governments and last but not least my own government, there's not much room for real privacy online these days.
>> 1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.
> Can we audit American corporations?
What's your point? Did you even read what I wrote? The five words of your comment seem to be pretty sloppy:
1. If you're taking about their products, which is probably what you meant: if you think they're your adversary, then the answer is no, it's pointless.
2. But your comment as written reads as if you're talking about auditing the corporations themselves, which does in fact happen (for tax and financial reporting purposes).
To make conversation productive, please define "national security" in this case.
For example, if China can't install its hardware in Pentagon, why is it a threat to national security.
On the other hand, if you say, Intel will be in trouble because of these chips, then I would say, so what? Wasn't this a dream of MBAs, educated by the top US schools, to outsource everything in business to cheaper service providers (e.g. manufacturing to China, software development to India and etc,.)
3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources to show this is not a sudden new development:
Over the next decade, China plans to invest up to RMB 1 trillion (US$161 billion) into its domestic semiconductor industry as it seeks to become a global power in the sector. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly stated that developing its own integrated circuit (IC) industry is of integral national strategic concern. - https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chips-all-in-investing-i...
This isn't to be dismissive of what they ARE delivering - china has the potential to be very big in RAM, and Storage in the comming decades. But I'm not sure that they met their industrial and geopolitical goals with these efforts.
> 3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources:
Yeah, I agree. The US and its allies took the wrong lessons from the economic aspect of the cold war. They saw Western capitalism out-perform Soviet central planning, then let capitalist ideologues run amok.
China has the advantage: since it's not run by capitalist ideologues it better able to correct the deficiencies of capitalism AND it can exploit predictable capitalist behavior for strategic advantage.
OH, BUT we have fable! We have AI! of course we can answer these questions? can't we? which is true: America's AI is a super powerful defense against our enemies or America's AI is too stupid to defend against such a threat, and only sactions and import controls will suffice.
Just seems like you're inventing things to be scared of.
So it’s an overpriced middle of the road phone to signal ones devotion to Trump and doesn’t actually deliver on several of its core promises (like made in USA).
Last i read most of the money came from people not reading the fine print on their $100 deposit and only a few thousand have actually been distributed.
Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still
I don’t want to get bogged down in a source dispute - this is very easy to search and/but I only spent about 60s on it. I am hardly an expert. Feel free to look it up as well and tell me how I am entirely wrong. This was a combination of AI responses + thumbing through the sources linked to make sure it wasn’t invented whole cloth.
I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.
I don't think they are selling well, either. I was wondering at your source since it would be very atypical for any company to give any numbers at all, let alone a company that's so outwardly sketchy, let alone numbers like "This is the number of orders we have standing open despite being actively in production." This is the exact kind of thing I would not expect to be easy to search, and it'd be ripe for AI hallucination.
The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.
And everybody forgets the true power of Apple: scale. Can that supposed miracle chip be readily found in million of phones within 6 months? Or will Xiaomi keep selling 90% of their phones with 2 year old chips, reserving these chips to their 2000$ foldables?
This post serves Xiaomi because it implies competitiveness when the reality on the ground will remain unremarkable, and it helps fearmongers because they can latch on to Xiaomi's attempt to appear competitive.
Their power of scale applies to less and less regions. Xiaomi, in particular, delivers that to China where Apple previously slapped and now is becoming a niche player. It's the same as with German car makers. The trend have now reversed, with Chinese manufacturers starting to dominate on foreign markets and it's also something that was unfathomable just a few years back.
They have proven countless of times by now that they are not to be ignored.
Are you really cheerleading right now for massive, monopolistic, post-capitalism corporations? The thing you have decided to focus on is not only irrelevant to the topic at hand, but irrelevant in the minds of most consumers.
Current Apple hardware has a number of selling points for me, but the number of iPhones they've carelessly pumped into the world is not one of them. If anything, contemplating the amount of slave labor which Apple has contributed to leads to the opposite effect.
Additionally, in China, Apple maintains around a quarter market share vs Android's three-quarters share. The argument you are making is not even coherent.
I myself would be on a Xiaomi phone if GrapheneOS were able to support one.
I can install Firefox (and Chrome) extensions with the Orion Browser. It‘s developed by Kagi
https://orionbrowser.com/
I also installed uBlock Origin on Orion, which works quite well on iOS
I'm not sure that it matters. You can't put a Qualcomm chip in an iPhone and you can't put Apple Silicon in any other device. So there's no really straightforward way to compare them other than specs on paper, which we all know are theoretical until they get integrated.
I don't see any editorializing, mostly just reports that China is actually competing well.
Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.
But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.
This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.
And good news for everyone else.
MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is also manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [2]
There was no world interdependence change (unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries).
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-launches-XRing-O3-claim...
[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9500-Proces...
When we buy software from Silicon Valley or a nice Mercedes Benz from Germany we don’t use this same language “outsourcing.”
Colloquially, outsourcing implies low quality or cheap price. No, what’s happening here is that China makes the best products in numerous categories and we are choosing to import them, because the best products are the most desirable.
That said some of these industry especially metallurgical ones will never return to Europe or US as they basically destroy and pollute the environment on a large scale, in China that still seems acceptable but also might change promoting them to outsource to other countries which they already do in some areas I think.
It will be interesting to see what China does. They aren't ideologically committed to exclusively serving the interests of the wealthy, but they still have lots of rich people in the (ahem) Communist Party, so who knows.
- China weaponizing the world's dependence on rare earth
- The US weaponizing the world's dependence on SWIFT
- Russia weaponizing Europe's dependence on natural gas
- Iran weaponizing the the world's dependence of oil supply through strait of Hormuz
China could have the monopoly of rare earth production and refinery for all of eternity. But because of their reaction towards all the us allies when the us increased tariffs, I don't expect them to be relevant enough to disrupt markets with rare earths sanctions in 10-20 years.
... Except when they can't in any meaningful span of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0
Is this better outcome for the US in the room with us?
And eventually, just like the Western solar, battery, pharma and car companies all have learned, the CCP will use that knowledge to surpass and undercut everyone else.
This is so stupid. China itself uses the "dominate and corral" model for their industries, and had severe tariffs to grow their various industrial bases, such as automotive.
Kafka himself would be proud if their unlocking process[0], but technically sure, they allow it
> Press "Apply for unlocking" at exactly 12:00 AM GMT+8 (pressing it too late will cause the "application quota limit reached" error. Use this website to check the time) "Account Error" might show up. If that happens, retry after 10 days
[0] https://github.com/realdtn2/xiaomi-unlocking-rooting-guide
It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.
Obviously, Apple forgot to pay and this is Geekbench "friendly reminder" that there's a invoice to pay.
What a life to live, some of the people here have. HAHAHA.
I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.
In multicore, sure. In most single threaded workloads as well? That'd be interesting enough on its own, regardless of wattage (though that'd make it even more interesting), as my A19 device gives my overclocked 9800X3D a run for its money (and some losses) in single threaded workloads and that's the only thing the 9800X3D is really targeting.
XRing O3 AnTuTu: 5.5 million
---
M5 iPad Geekbench Single-Core: 3,556
M5 Max Geekbench Single-Core: 4,300
XRing O3 Geekbench Single-Core: 3,945
---
M5 iPad Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,285
M5 Max Geekbench Multi-Core: 29,200
XRing O3 Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,221
For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)
I'm right there with you questioning Meta's value for society, but I do believe it has less opportunity for abuse/manipulation
I don't care about internal politics of a state, as long as they are not killing people deliberately on a daily basis or invading other countries and killing their people.
How government is structured is up to Chinese people to decide
> Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
It's not only about scale and upstart, it's also about how much are they harming society.
I’m sure Apple’s chips could do better in single core if they were willing to push the power envelope way higher too.
Multi-core is easy to beat, just add more cores until you win. There were already chips that beat the M series just by having way more threads/cores.
Modern processor without memory tagging for example is a little..... dated, given how much the new AIs accelerated the vulnerability discovery in all the apps and system components.
"WSJ
I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/chinese-ev-test-drive...
"
They know they are inferior, and choose not to compete, just lobby for more regulations to keep competitors out. Free market, haha.
250 billion in EV subsidies from China. 10 billion by the U.S.
What OS will these chips run and what is the competition on that platform? He makes a lot of comparisons to AMD and Intel in the post, why not benchmark against them?
Do you want to compare to Intel/AMD? If these are destined for phones that’s not a useful comparison by your metric.
I’m pretty sure they will, as they have, like clockwork, in the same month, for over a decade.
And multithreaded is 10 cores vs 6 cores.
I appreciate Apple being kept on their feet, but they're not dethroned yet.
Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.
That probably explains why there's so few of these CPUs around: the yields of the domestic Chinese lithography processes (non-EUV) are awful.
the a20pro and what not will match or beat it and the cycle will continue.
if this chip turns into a decent desktop chip then arm linux laptops might be very nice.
But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.
> The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.
Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.
Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).
It is still not a bad results though. And we are about to see MediaTek Dimensity 9600 based on ARM C2-Ultra.
From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)
Your Linux based dream phone is not going to sell more than 10 units.
Your Linux phone statement is a fallacy.
Ask FuriLabs how many of their phones they have sold.[0] High confident it is more than 10.
FuriLabs moved their batman, battery monitoring application, from Python to C and it really improved performance. Native applications really do keep resource usage low and is beneficial.
[0] https://furilabs.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime
I'm too stupid or mad a Trump to care.
I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.
So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.
Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.
But they have stopped making premium laptop since then.
I don't think they have any angle with that.
Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt: in your mothertongue, the meaning of “design” is not as broad as in English?
>The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
>https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra
1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...
A revision or other reply would benefit from explaining how their value chain x location correspondence is wrong - perhaps missing a step?
Though, in anticipation of a revision, I wonder if its simple as you thought the cores were custom-designed by Xiaomi instead of standard ARM.
The motivation for such messages may be greedy, but it doesn't mean the facts aren't wrong:
1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.
2. Free market incentives work counter to national security all the time, in many ways (e.g. causing domestic capabilities to wither and die).
If "China" decides it doesn't like me, my life really isn't going to change much. If my electric company decides it doesn't like me, I'm in big trouble.
I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!
While they plan 50 years ahead, we are stuck re-litigating the most basic "united we stand, divided we fall" logic, even while the consequences are all around us. But congratulations on your enlightened individualism.
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673
[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro...
[5] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2...
[6] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
[8] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
[9] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...
[10] Businesses with Chinese connections gave Australia's major parties more than $5.5 million between 2013 and 2015, making them easily the largest source of foreign-linked donations. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-21/australian-groups-str...
[11] Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/apple-ch...
[12] Chinese students in Australia fear reprisals at home if they speak out, inquiry hears - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/12/chine...
[13] Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, says that [..] American scholars practice self-censorship about China and adopt the official narrative of the Chinese regime when talking about sensitive issues. “We don’t talk about ‘Taiwan independence.’ We talk about ‘the cross-Strait relations.’ We don’t talk about ‘the occupation of Tibet.’ We don’t call the June 4th Massacre ‘massacre.’ - https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-american-academy-misle...
[14] China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/chinese-officials-co...
[15] Leica Camera has sought to distance itself from a promotional video depicting photographers covering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown three decades ago, after it landed the German company in hot water in China. - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...
[16] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...
[17] China gets German children's book about COVID withdrawn - https://www.dw.com/en/china-gets-german-childrens-book-about...
Edit as reply ("posting too fast", thanks HN) to all the "but the US also does bad things" "counterarguments":
> Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
I'm European, and not stupid enough to believe that because the US is acting poorly or even in some cases hostile to Europe (to say nothing of the Middle East or South America), that we should roll over and allow China to subjugate us instead. Neither should the US. This is "you are not pure and innocent enough for self-defense" logic. Please don't drag the rest of us down in some deluded attempt at atonement.
All of South America already feels that way about the USA. Add the EU if we include the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard.
Sadly Colombia just elected a US citizen as the new president. The "subordinate receivers of orders" status has been achieved.
Meanwhile look at the southchina sea shenanigans and the behavior of Chinese fishing fleets all over the world.
Secret police in Canada and stuff like this - yes go ahead nail them and kick those out of the country. Has nothing to do with the trade.
No, the GP's comment is an attempt to correct the mistake you were so kind to outline. There's no reason we must stick with the approach set by a previous set of leaders who turned out to be short-signed and naive, and course corrections start with outlining the problems and contradictions of the present course.
As a Canadian, I am going to be honest and say that I thought at first you were describing the United States of 2026.
I mean, we have a much better opinion of China. As does almost the entire world. For extremely good reason.
There is one country bombing endless nations, stealing resources, engaging in sea piracy, undermining democracies, trying to destroy the West, and so on, and it is the United States of America under a juvenile halfwit self-dealing shitbag pedophile, working on behalf of an utterly deranged group of kleptocrats.
Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
They're not an adversary in the same way that a guy demanding your wallet at knifepoint is, or a company able to cut off your electricity is.
China is an adversary in the sense that they're a totalitarian government, who, by the nature of that system, cannot brook any sort of opposition to their ideology, plans, or desires. All within the state, none without. That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time because doing so will suggest that the powers-that-be in China might not have all of the answers to the human condition. Either you fall in line, or you have to be eliminated.
If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.
This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.
How in the world is the USA existing with other systems then? By taking it all over with force and subterfuge? It is obvious to those with eyes that China, despite being "totalitarian" has been the better actor (compared to the USA) on the world stage for decades now.
> If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Yea, because Americans are fucking violent jerks and can only get what they want through threats and intimidation.
Especially when you compare it to the US, where our democracy and capitalism have led us to numerous wars and war-crimes.
Like, just this year, we've committed far more breaches of international law than china https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_the_2026_Iran_war#...
In recent history, we performed dozens of violent coups and destroyed countries in the name of overthrowing communist regimes.
China has a totalitarian government, but it's existing more in harmony with the world than the US government has for all of my life, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese government will conflict with other countries while in the same breath implying the US government is better.
I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Myopically individualistic perspectives, focused on your individual wants and day-to-day experiences, miss a lot of stuff.
Nobody in Ukraine who wasn't already explicitly pro-Russian thought that in 2013, did they? Russia-aligned individuals poisoned the third president of Ukraine during his presidential campaign, very likely with direct assistance. You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
You're being too literal. I'm sure Ukrainians weren't actually so stupid as many Americans can be.
My point is you could transplant that logic (elevate individual, myopic interests and gripes; lose sight of the community you're part of), into a situation that we've already seen play out (Ukraine v. Russia).
China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.
China isn't even a threat to the the daily life of individual Americans in the way that Russia was (and arguably is)
My whole point is that looking at it from the perspective of the "daily life of individual Americans" is the wrong one.
Also, while no two situations are going to be exactly the same, I think it's false to say "China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans." It'd be happy to turn the US into a weak, low-tech country whose only exports are agriculture and natural resources. I can't find it right now, but I've read a quote from some high-level Chinese official to that effect.
I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.
> Can we audit American corporations?
What's your point? Did you even read what I wrote? The five words of your comment seem to be pretty sloppy:
1. If you're taking about their products, which is probably what you meant: if you think they're your adversary, then the answer is no, it's pointless.
2. But your comment as written reads as if you're talking about auditing the corporations themselves, which does in fact happen (for tax and financial reporting purposes).
For example, if China can't install its hardware in Pentagon, why is it a threat to national security.
On the other hand, if you say, Intel will be in trouble because of these chips, then I would say, so what? Wasn't this a dream of MBAs, educated by the top US schools, to outsource everything in business to cheaper service providers (e.g. manufacturing to China, software development to India and etc,.)
Where is the threat and what is the threat?
You have a funny definition of "productive".
Back in 2014, the central government set up the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. - https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2145422/how-ch...
Over the next decade, China plans to invest up to RMB 1 trillion (US$161 billion) into its domestic semiconductor industry as it seeks to become a global power in the sector. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly stated that developing its own integrated circuit (IC) industry is of integral national strategic concern. - https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chips-all-in-investing-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...
That was a 2016 article.
We're at the other end of that investment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhQrz9EJ40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KrdcTsScKk
It did not quite turn out like china wanted.
This isn't to be dismissive of what they ARE delivering - china has the potential to be very big in RAM, and Storage in the comming decades. But I'm not sure that they met their industrial and geopolitical goals with these efforts.
Yeah, I agree. The US and its allies took the wrong lessons from the economic aspect of the cold war. They saw Western capitalism out-perform Soviet central planning, then let capitalist ideologues run amok.
China has the advantage: since it's not run by capitalist ideologues it better able to correct the deficiencies of capitalism AND it can exploit predictable capitalist behavior for strategic advantage.
Just seems like you're inventing things to be scared of.
Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still
I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.
The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.
It's generally a bad idea to use information-handling hardware from your main geopolitical rival.
This post serves Xiaomi because it implies competitiveness when the reality on the ground will remain unremarkable, and it helps fearmongers because they can latch on to Xiaomi's attempt to appear competitive.
They have proven countless of times by now that they are not to be ignored.
Current Apple hardware has a number of selling points for me, but the number of iPhones they've carelessly pumped into the world is not one of them. If anything, contemplating the amount of slave labor which Apple has contributed to leads to the opposite effect.
Additionally, in China, Apple maintains around a quarter market share vs Android's three-quarters share. The argument you are making is not even coherent.
I myself would be on a Xiaomi phone if GrapheneOS were able to support one.
(Also I'd recommend https://libredirect.manerakai.com/)
1) Pick a historically extremely innovative and disciplined culture which also happens to have massive human capital
2) Please arbitrary artificial ill-thought-out economic constraints on them
3) wait a while
4) get a bunch of magnificent spanking in return (AI, chips, etc...)
Not these. They seem to be using ARM-designed cores that others already use and TSMC fabs in Taiwan.
Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.
And yes, it is known that they do steal tech as samsung discovered in their tech preview phone bust in korea.