Today, Xiaomi announced the budget smartphone Poco C40 based on the exotic JLQ JR510 chipset.It's really
Let's start with the fact that Poco C40 is not the firstsmartphone based on the JLQ chipset. A whole range of such devices is offered by the Chinese company Treswave. However, even we have never heard anything about Treswave, and we have not found any traces of sales of its smartphones. So it is quite possible that there really was no mass production of JLQ backgrounds before the Poco C40. Immediately, we note an interesting oddity regarding Treswave: in its assortment there are smartphones with JLQ and budget Qualcomm (type 215), but neither MediaTek nor UniSoC. Strange, isn't it?
Treswave smartphone based on JLQ JR510
But back to JLQ itself.This is not a startup that came out of nowhere. The company was founded five years ago by four co-founders: Wise Road Capital, JAC Capital, Leadcore and Qualcomm. The first of them was somehow offended, and the first letters of the other three formed the name JLQ. The first two companies are investment funds, this is not particularly interesting; but the names Leadcore and Qualcomm are much better known to us.
Xiaomi Redmi 2A
Okay, don't be surprised if Leadcore's name is for youunfamiliar. This is a small Chinese chipmaker that has been cooperating with Xiaomi for a long time. Its L1860C chipset was the basis of Xiaomi Redmi 2A (it was a long time ago!), in addition, Leadcore participated in the creation of the company Pinecone, which creates Surge chipsets. Now the Surge line has been reduced to image processors, but once Pinecone released a full-fledged Surge S1 smartphone chipset, it was at the heart of Xiaomi Mi 5c.
JLQ JA310 official specifications
What kind of Qualcomm company, I think it’s not possible to tellit is necessary, but it is necessary to show the scale of the influence of the American corporation on JLQ. As our colleagues at Xiaomiui write, the previous JLQ chipset, the JA310, used a Qualcomm 4G modem and a Qualcomm Hexagon signal processor. Well, there are two very important components in the JA310 - these are just Qualcomm components! Most likely, within the framework of JR510, the level of cooperation is no less; perhaps this explains why it is easier for Treswave to switch from budget Qualcomm to JLQ and back than to master MediaTek and UniSoC chips.
With this level of dependence on Qualcomm,JLQ can hardly be considered a "project to resist sanctions." Besides, JLQ is in no hurry to localize the production of its chipsets in China. JA310 is produced at 11nm at Samsung factories; where the JR510 is manufactured is unknown, but it also uses a very unusual 11 nm process technology, which is best mastered by Samsung (TSMC and other competitors have relied on 10 nm and 12 nm).
Summing up, we can say that JLQ isa joint project of Qualcomm and the Chinese company Leadcore, which has been cooperating with Xiaomi for a long time. Its chipsets are based on Qualcomm technology and are apparently assembled by Samsung. It's hard to say whether JLQ will remain on the margins of the smartphone market just like Leadcore/Pinecone, or whether its products will replace chipsets like Qualcomm 215, which the American corporation is clearly tired of releasing. Wait and see.
© Oleg Lazarev.
Based on JLQ, Xiaomiui, Treswave, Mobile World Live