Xiaomi 18 Fold Is Official, and Its New XRING O3 Chip Sounds Insane!

Xiaomi has finally confirmed the Xiaomi 18 Fold, and we won't have to wait long to see it. The company's next foldable will launch in China this September with the new XRING O3, Xiaomi's latest flagship chip. Pre-orders are already open, even though Xiaomi hasn't revealed the full phone yet.

The phone itself is interesting, but I think the chip inside may be the bigger story.

Xiaomi confirmed the 18 Fold during the launch of its new XRING chips. The company didn't give us a full spec sheet, but it did confirm that the foldable and the upcoming Pad 9 Pro Max will both use the XRING O3.

The O3 is built on a 3nm process and has a 10-core CPU. It uses two C1-Ultra cores at up to 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores at 3.68GHz and four C1-Pro cores at 3.15GHz. Xiaomi also pairs it with a new 16-core G2-Ultra NX GPU.

The XRING O3 scored 5.22 million points in AnTuTu, according to the company. That would make it the first mobile chip to pass five million points in the benchmark.

Of course, I wouldn't buy a phone because of an AnTuTu score. Real heat, battery use and gaming tests will tell us much more.

The XRING O3 is also the first mobile chip with LPDDR6 memory support, with bandwidth reaching 113.8GB/s. Xiaomi says that's 48% higher than the XRING O1.

To be honest, this interests me more than the benchmark score.

Foldable phones need to handle large screens, heavy multitasking and plenty of AI work. Faster memory could help with all of that, while the new chip also gives Xiaomi more control over power use and performance.

And Xiaomi clearly wants that control. Reuters reports that the company has already spent more than 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) on chip development and now has over 3,000 people working on semiconductors.

We still don't know everything about the phone. Xiaomi has shown a shorter and wider foldable design, but details such as the cameras, battery and charging speeds have not been officially confirmed yet.

That should change soon. The Xiaomi 18 Fold launches in China in September, and pre-orders are already live. There is no word on a global release.

I liked the direction Xiaomi took with its earlier Fold phones, but this one feels different. The company isn't just trying to make another thin foldable. It is putting its own flagship silicon inside it.

If the XRING O3 can deliver that performance without killing battery life, the Xiaomi 18 Fold may be the phone that proves Xiaomi no longer needs Qualcomm for its best hardware.