Xiaomi announced that the upcoming Xiaomi 18 Fold will be powered by the in-house Xring O3 chip, the successor to the Xring O1. What happened to the O2? Well, the O3 is so good, that Xiaomi skipped a number – that’s only partially a joke as Geekerwan examined the new chip and it says it delivers a two-generations improvement in energy efficiency compared to the O1.

The Xring O3 is a contradiction – it uses older tech and yet it looks like it can fight the upcoming Dimensity 9600 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips. For starters, the chip is fabbed by TSMC on a 3nm node called N3P, an improved version of the N3E that was used for the O1. N3P is also used for the outgoing Dimensity 9500 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. MediaTek and Qualcomm will use a new 2nm node for their upcoming 9600 and Gen 6 chips.

It’s not just that – Xiaomi used Arm’s C1 series of CPU cores, which are already in the Dimensity 9500 and the Exynos 2600. The upcoming Dimensity 9600 will surely switch to the C2 series of CPU cores that should be announced soon. Even so, the results are quite impressive – the Xring O3 trounces the Dimensity 9500 in performance and energy efficiency and comes close to Apple’s A19 CPU cores. If the CPU can run at full tilt, it hits the 15,000 points mark in multi-core Geekbench, so it gets close to Apple M5 level of performance.

Note that since the Xiaomi 18 Fold hasn't actually been announced, the Xring O3 is currently only available for testing on a development board. The GPU is a proper beast – if we ever see it in a laptop, that laptop will beat laptops with Intel Lunar Lake and come close to M5-powered MacBooks. Xiaomi also included an in-house developed NPU, which offers a massive 200 TOPS of performance using INT4.