Forget waiting for the official announcement. The Xiaomi 18 Fold just gave us a sneak peek at what it’s packing, straight from a Geekbench AI listing. And if you care at all about where in-house chips are headed, this one’s worth paying attention to.
According to Gizmochina, the device appeared on Geekbench AI 1.7.0 under the model number Xiaomi 2608BPX34C. The listing points to the Xring O3 chip, Xiaomi’s own silicon built on a 3nm process. This isn’t Xiaomi buying off-the-shelf Snapdragon and calling it a day. The company has been building toward its own chip strategy for a while now, and the Xring O3 looks like its most serious move yet.
On the AI benchmark side, the phone scored 629 in Single Precision, 799 in Half Precision, and 634 in the Quantized test. Those aren’t jaw-dropping numbers on their own, but context matters here. This is a foldable phone running a brand new in-house chip, and the scores are competitive enough to suggest Xiaomi isn’t sacrificing AI performance just to keep things thin and foldable.
The CPU setup is where things get genuinely interesting. The Xring O3 is a 10-core chip with four cores at 3.15GHz, four at 3.69GHz, and two performance cores hitting 4.36GHz. That top-end clock speed is right up there with what you’d expect from Qualcomm’s best this year. The listing also confirms 16GB of RAM and Android 17 out of the box.
This matters because Xiaomi isn’t the only one going all-in on home-grown silicon right now. Apple has been doing it for years. Samsung is pushing its own Exynos chips back into flagship territory. And now Xiaomi is trying to prove it can compete at the top level with its own hardware. If the Xring O3 delivers on what these early benchmarks suggest, that’s a real shift in how we think about Chinese Android flagships.
The Xiaomi 18 Fold isn’t showing up alone, either. The Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, also running the Xring O3, has already crossed 14,000 points in Geekbench’s multi-core test, with a peak score of 14,319. So the chip is performing consistently across different form factors, which is a good sign for the platform as a whole.
Here’s a quick look at what we know about the Xiaomi 18 Fold so far:
- Chipset: Xiaomi Xring O3, built on 3nm
- CPU: 10-core setup, with peak cores at 4.36GHz
- RAM: 16GB confirmed via Geekbench
- OS: Android 17
- Geekbench AI scores: 629 (Single Precision), 799 (Half Precision), 634 (Quantized)
Both the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Pad 9 Pro Max are expected to launch together in the first half of September in China. Separately, the Xiaomi 18 series, which runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 rather than Xiaomi’s own chip, is expected toward the end of the month. So September is shaping up to be a big one for Xiaomi fans. Pricing and global availability are still unknown, but given how Xiaomi’s recent foldables have been priced, expect it to undercut the Galaxy Z Fold range. Whether it can compete on software and long-term support is a different question entirely.