Another Chinese electronics giant is planning to manufacture their own processors.
According to the report by CNBeta, the new initiative by OPPO is being led by Chen Yan, Qualcomm’s former technical director. A new internal memo revealed the “Mariana Plan” to OPPO employees, which is the codename of the upcoming project. In addition, engineers working for Realme and OnePlus are joining in to speed up the process.
The two companies’ involvement is no surprise considering that they all shared designs and features in the past. In late 2019, OPPO has announced that it has allocated approximately $7 billion for research and development in the next three years.
In a statement provided to C114 News, OPPO said that “our ultimate goal of making chips is to serve our customers well. This is a long-term investment, not to compete with our partners.” However, the company notes that it still values MediaTek and Qualcomm as special partners. That probably means that the development is still far away and they’ll continue getting chips from these manufacturers for the meantime.
Because of Huawei’s issues with the US, Chinese companies are teaming up and resorting to creating their own solutions in case they face a similar situation in the future. Previously, it was reported that Xiaomi, Vivo, Huawei, and OPPO plan to build an alternative to Google’s Play Store.