The smartphone world's become very competitive over the past couple of years. Manufacturers have started to rely a lot on in-house manufacturing for different components. Taking the lead here is Korean tech giant Samsung, which manufacturers almost everything from RAM, processors to displays in-house. It's a phenomenon that's hurt Qualcomm quite badly too, as the US chip giant suffers from having to depend on third parties for its products. Following Apple and Samsung's lead, Xiaomi is also developing its in-house chipsets. Take a look below to find out more.

Xiaomi Is Developing Two Custom Processors Dubbed Pinecone 1 And Pinecone 2

A new page has just gone up on China's social networking site Weibo. It's dubbed Pinecone, and is dedicated towards the Chinese smartphone starlet's own processors. Rumors of such silicon have been around for quite a while. The company's Redmi 2A came featuring a Leadcore chipset. Now, the pair have partnered up to develop new chipsets for the Chinese smartphone maker's devices.

Dubbed as the Pinecone 1 and Pinecone 2, the pair will target middle and top tier devices respectively. The pair will feature eight cores. The Pinecone 1 will feature eight Cortex A53 cores, while the Pinecone 2 will feature four Cortex A53 and four Cortex A72 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. These specifications are very impressive, though there's little more detail for the pair.

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Not only is the processor's Weibo page up, but there's also a website for those interested. The Pinecone 1 will directly target MediaTek's Helio P10, which also comes with eight Cortex A53 cores. Sources expect the Pinecone 1 to feature on Xiaomi's Mi 5c, which had been rumored with a Snapdragon 635 earlier. It'll be a nice start for Xiaomi and the company will provide good competition to the likes of Huawei and MediaTek.

The Xiaomi 5c is rumored to feature a 5.5 inch 1080p display, 3GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Xiaomi caught the spotlight with the launch of the Mi 4 but slow progress with the device's successors have left the company out of the news lately. At one time, the Chinese smartphone maker had been heralded as the Eastern 'Apple', with its catchy presentations and casual executive dressing. Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments section below and stay tuned for the latest.