Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi may have a smartphone equipped with a 192MP camera sensor in development, as claimed by leaker Digital Chat Station on Weibo. As per the leak, the 192MP camera sensor that Xiaomi plans to employ will support 16-in-1 pixel binning, which means that the image output will be in 12MP resolution. The phone is likely to be powered by Qualcomm’s SM8450, tentatively named Snapdragon 895, which is going to be the next flagship mobile platform from the American chipmaker after Snapdragon 888.. The SM8450 is expected to have a 4nm architecture with ARMV9-based next-gen Kryo 780 CPU cores, new Adreno 730 GPU, next-gen Spectra 680 GPU and the integrated X65 5G modem. The mobile chipset is speculated to be unveiled in the third quarter of this year after which devices with the chipset will be introduced to the international markets.
The rumours regarding the camera and processor alone make for top-of-the-line specifications, which strongly hints at a flagship device being in the works. Xiaomi has earlier brought mid-range devices like the Mi Mix Alpha and the Mi Note 10 (Pro) with a 108MP camera sensor. But this is a 192MP one and is expected to be a flagship only, whichever series Xiaomi brings it to. As to when this phone may launch, rumours expect the launch to be sometime around the beginning of the next year, maybe in December or January, depending upon the availability of the SM8450 chipset.
Meanwhile, the successor to the Snapdragon 888 (SD 888) is already out as Snapdragon 888+. The new SD 888+ chipset is an upgraded version of the SD 888, with an improved clock speed to 3GHz (from 2.48GHz) and faster AI, with a claimed 20% improvement. Its predecessor can perform 26 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for AI tasks, but with the 20% improvement, the SD 888+ is capable of 32 TOPS. These two are the major improvements that have been made for the new chipset. The hardware of the SD 888+ is identical to the SD 888.
