Xiaomi’s Lei Jun has Tweeted that the next Xiaomi Redmi 2A will go on sale at just 499 Yuan with Chinese made Leadcore processor.
Xiaomi’s investment in Chinese SoC maker Leadcore has finally born fruit. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has announced on Weibo that the budget Xiaomi Redmi 2A will use the Leadcore LC1860 chipset in place of a Snapdragon 410 to help reduce the cost of the phone to only 499 Yuan.
All other components of the phone will remain unchanged with a 4.7-inch HD display, 2 mega-pixel front camera, and 8 mega-pixel rear. The current Redmi 2A comes in either 1GB RAM or 2GB RAM versions, but the amount of RAM hasn’t been announced for the new Leadcore model.
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The Leadcore LC1860 chipset is the first Chinese designed and manufactured processor to power an Android smartphone. The chip in the Redmi 2A is actually the LC1860C, a quad-core model running at 1.5Ghz and a Mali-T628 MP2 GPU. There is also a more power LC1860 Hexacore chip that runs at 2Ghz, this could become the SoC in future Redmi phones.
The LC1860 also has LTE support. So far only Chinese versions of the phone will use Leadcore chips.
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Wow! They’ve over – photoshopped the bezels out of existence ?
Bad phones ……
lol you are just creating news.
The news here is that the 2A sold 5.1 million units since it hit retail on April 8 after being launched on March 31.
For the most part the retail price was 499CNY, it was launched at 599 but first sale was at 499 and after not selling well for a while at 599,the price was permanently reduced to 499CNY.
There is no new phone,there is no new pricing, they just released sales numbers.
Edit: a Leadcore roadmap just showed up http://news.mydrivers.com/1/439/439820.htm
If I remember right they were planning to selling 13 million units of 2A in this year.
A 28nm 64-bit octacore with Mali-T820 by end of the year seems like targeting to MT6755 competitor.
Nothing special, but could be cheaper than Mediatek one.
I remember another Leadcore roadmap showed a quad core A53 with T720 MP6 GPU scheduled to early 2015. Yet it never showed up.
Leadcore is owned by Datang and Datang does invest a lot in R&D. Datang was also rumored to be sniffing around Marvell for a cooperation deal or a buy of Marvell’s wireless business but that seems unlikely to happen. In any case Leadcore has ambitions and their collaboration with Xiaomi matters a lot too so it’s worth keeping an eye on them.
Their modem is also interesting since it’s software defined ( others went that way too, Nvidia but they gave up on 4G and Altair).but no idea how good their modem is( perf, power, die size).
thanks for your comment, I was confused (always saw the redmi 2A at 499 yuan)
5.1 million in 3 months of sale is pretty good for a phone with such limited availability. If they took this phone to markets like Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia they could easily reach that 12 million goal.
I thought Kirin too was a Chinese designed and manufactured SoC? Or are we talking about the processor behind the chip itself?