Credit: Oppo
It’s peak chip announcement season, it seems, and Oppo has just unveiled its first piece of custom silicon at its Inno Day 2021 — named MariSilicon X. This is not a fully-fledged SoC like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or Google Tensor, but rather a custom image signal processor, or imaging NPU, imbued with Oppo’s machine learning smarts.
According to Oppo, algorithms are leading the way for mobile photography innovations yet SoC machine learning number-crunching capabilities are currently the bottleneck to better images. Google would probably agree, having dropped Qualcomm’s Snapdragon in favor of its own custom silicon. As such, the MariSilicon X is built to power Oppo’s AI imaging algorithms for pictures and up to 4K 30fps HDR video.