At the end of February, Xiaomi has officially released its own Pinecone S1 processor, which is first used on Xiaomi MI5C, Pinecone S1 uses 28nm, built in Eight Cortex-A53 architecture, Mali T860 GPU, the overall performance is quite good, which can compare with Snapdragon 625 and Helio P10.
Namely, the most unsatisfied part of Pinecone S1 is 28nm, although Xiaomi MI5C doesn’t have caused over heat problem, if Pinecone S1 can upgrade to 16nm, the battery life and temperature can perform better. Right now the good news is that Pinecone Surge S2 will adopt 16nm, according to @Kevin Wang’s dairy, Surge S2 16nm has been leaked, hope its performance will be over our expectation.
Although right now we have no idea about Pinecone Surge S2 specs, we can speculate that it will continue Octa core design, Cortex-A73, and it will improve its GPU largely, the final specs will be similar to Kirin 960 processor.
Take Pinecone Surge S1 as example, it has been leaked in July 2015, and launches in February 2017, so it has been tested in 19 months. Therefore, Xiaomi Pinecone Surge S2 doesn’t have to wait for so long because of first experience. Maybe this year we will see Pinecone Surge S2 smartphones. But there is long way to upgrade 10nm SoC like other popular flagship smartphones.