Xiaomi is the Chinese tech giant. Their phones compete with iPhones. Their new CPU roughly matches Apple cores on single threaded tasks, and is much faster in multithreaded execution. Of course, Apple may soon announce their next processor, so this edge may not last long. And you may find it it difficult to find a phone with the next CPU (Xring O3). But the new Xiaomi processor is worth discussing further as it reveals an important trend. The chip has a lot of cache (44 MB in total). It is more than most laptop CPUs. If you have an Intel processor in your laptop, chances are good that you have less cache. The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD). It is astonishingly wide, with 21 execution ports, six of which support SIMD operations (128 bits). This is more execution ports than you have on your Intel/AMD processor. The AMD Zen 5 has the upper hand because it can do 4x512-bit but 6x128-bit is the best you can do on an ARM chip as far as I know. So the trend is clear. We are getting cores that are massively parallel in terms of the number of execution units. We get better SIMD (more units) and many more units capable of doing arithmetic. This means that you can do many, many independent additions or multiplications per cycle. And much more cache. This is where all the transistors go.

Vernor Vinge coined the term 'singularity' to refer to an incomprehensible regime change in technology. Here is what he wrote in 1993. « I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.) From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. I think it's fair to call this event a singularity. It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. »