vivo develops a custom imaging chip, will debut with X70 series

Samsung and Huawei are two of the few Android players on the market right now offering custom chipsets, but Xiaomi has also dabbled in the custom silicon game this year. Instead of offering a full-blown chipset, however, Xiaomi brought an in-house image signal processor (ISP) to the Mi Mix Fold to handle camera-related tasks.

Now, it looks like vivo is the latest manufacturer to take this route, as it will apparently offer a custom imaging chip soon. vivo executive vice president Hu Baishan reportedly confirmed the V1 ISP in a conference today (h/t: ITHome), adding that it would debut in next month’s X70 series.

There’s no word on what exactly the V1 ISP will be capable of, but the Mi Mix Fold’s Surge C1 silicon gives us a decent idea of what to expect. Xiaomi says the custom chip enables improved low-light image quality, better focusing, and improved auto-exposure and auto-white balance. So it stands to reason that we can expect vivo’s ISP to offer some of these upgrades.

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We’ve also seen the likes of HUAWEI and Samsung’s custom chipsets enable camera features like more advanced noise reduction, smoother zooming, and up to six cameras. In fact, Samsung’s Exynos chipsets offered 4K/60fps and 8K video capabilities before Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon processors. But it’s unclear whether vivo would be able to gain these kinds of video upgrades via the ISP alone.

We’ll need to wait for next month’s vivo X70 series to see what exactly the company is doing with the V1 ISP. Either way, it definitely looks like custom ISPs might be the new hot thing in the smartphone hardware space.