Zeku: Oppo's suddenly closed chip team was working on high-end CPU

The fact that the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo is closing its chip development department does not only come as a surprise to the public. The employees also found out about it at very short notice – they were in the process of developing a new high-end SoC.

The closure by the parent company of the Zeku subsidiary of the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo, which is one of the five largest providers in the world, was probably extremely surprising. Up until a few days ago, the developers were very busy and were in the process of bringing their first ARM processor for mobile devices, which they had developed behind closed doors, into the Android ecosystem.

Just over a week ago, the chip developers were still working at full speed

As Mishaal Rahman, Android Specialist and Author at XDA Developers, commented in astonishment on Twitter, it is extremely shocking how suddenly the relatively young Oppo chip team was closed. At the beginning of May – eight days ago to be precise – Zeku employees submitted patches for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to ensure that their new platforms were even recognized by Google’s mobile operating system.

Based on commits in the Android project, it was possible to understand that Oppo and Zeku were working on a completely “new” system-on-chip (SoC) for which they wanted to provide new display and GPU drivers and the like. It was clearly planned to make the new chip usable under Android.

Oppo was working on its own high-end platform for flagship smartphones

Rahman justifies this by saying that Oppo/Zeku may already have been working on a Board Support Package (BSP) for Android 14. Chipmakers use BSPs to create the hardware-specific boot firmware and other routines needed to run specific operating systems on their platforms.

The journalist also provides some details on what Oppo and Zeku were planning for their first major project, up until the extremely surprising abandonment of all chip development activities. Informed sources had heard that Zeku was working on its own customized high-end application processor, which would use a baseband package (i.e. the parts required for mobile communications) from the Taiwanese chip manufacturer MediaTek. So it was no longer just about additional chips, but about the heart of modern smartphones

Oppo reportedly wanted to use the new chip in a “future flagship smartphone,” according to Rahman. So far, Zeku has already been responsible for some quite impressive developments within the last two to three years. The team had created the MariSilicon series of Bluetooth and image processing or AI chips for Oppo, which Oppo still uses in its current smartphones.

Oppo probably wants to cut costs, since developing processors and other chips in-house usually consumes enormous sums of money. Officially, the closure of the chip division was justified with the continued low demand and the uncertain economic situation worldwide. Especially in China, Oppo’s most important market, the sales figures had recently fallen sharply. In Europe, Oppo is meanwhile on the back foot because of the ongoing patent disputes with the Finnish network supplier Nokia.

Summary