On March 14, 2022, when OPPO dropped the Find X5 Pro in the international marketplace, it was not unveiling another flagship. They were making a statement: we do not need to borrow some other technology, we are producing our own. The center of this EUR1,299 phone was MariSilicon X, the first own imaging chip of OPPO, and it could capture 4K videos in near-complete darkness. This was the first Android phone that had the capability of doing this. However, there is the twist that characterizes the whole mechanism here, to accommodate that revolutionary computational photography, OPPO traded off what flagship customers demand most, a serious zoom lens.
Find X5 Pro is a new step in smartphone design. Are you an opticalist or are you an all-better-computationalist? OPPO has taken the latter, and the aftermath, both magnificent and heinous, shows precisely what it takes to create your own silicon in 2024.
 |
| (Image credit : www.gsmarena.com) |
The Innovation That Reshaped Night Photography
MariSilicon X is no helper chip. It is a 6nm special purpose imaging processor that steals the complete photo pipeline. Most phones store and then compress and process images once they have been captured by the sensor, but the NPU in OPPO operates in the lossless RAW space, and processes 20-bit High Dynamic Range fusion without any data access at all. The result? A 8 dB signal-to-noise improvement or, in other words, your night photos are now actually good.
The innovative option is 4K Ultra Night Video and it is not a marketing gimmick. The NPU also provides video processing on AI at 20 times the speed of competitors and operates at four times the resolution. Every frame of a night video with a 4k resolution resembles a snapshot. That is computational photography with real-time video processing like Android had never imagined.
However, it requires agonizing trade-offs to create custom silicon. The proprietary NPU, in conjunction with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, was so hot that OPPO needed to raise the vapour chamber cooling system by 75 percent over the previous generation. Such is not a gradual modification, but a complete re-engineering of the internal design of the phone to avoid the issue of thermal throttling when in a resource-intensive task.
The Achilles heel of the Camera System
This is the point at which the strategy becomes complicated. The main camera, which was driven by the computational magic of MariSilicon X, was always admired in the reviews. The display gained the highest A+ rating of DisplayMate with 16 performance records. Battery life impressed. It reached a 50 percent charge in 12 minutes with the 80W SUPERVOOC charging.Then critics turned their cameras to the objects which were far away.
The 2x telephoto was generally the bane of criticism as being miles behind the times. Buyers anticipated 5x or even 10x periscope zooms at EUR1,299, which is standard on Samsung and rival flagships. They were instead provided with a relatively small 2x lens that could not compete with phones at hundreds of dollars cheaper. The Guardian review was not coy about it; the price was just too high to what it promises.
This wasn't an oversight. It was a calculated decision. The R&D budget in OPPO was spent on MariSilicon X the radically oversized cooling system, the 5-axis optical image stabilization system, which is SLR quality so complex that each camera module in the device is auto-tested. To check the sensor-shift compensation on each of the three X, Y and Z axes, a machine emulates the shaking of a hand-held device by adding a 3-degree jitter at 6 Hz, or 6 wobbles/second, to the sensor to confirm that the sensor-shift compensation is correct. That is the sort of stringent quality control that is supposed to be practiced by professional camera equipment and not smartphones.
The thing is that the message is clear, OPPO focused on computational depth and stabilization, but not optical range. They thought a perfect performance in low-light conditions of wide and ultra-wide lenses to be more important than a long-range zoom. The market disagreed.
Why This Portends a Paradigm Shift of flagship Strategy
The true endgame of OPPO is with the dual-chipset strategy of the Find X5 Pro. Whereas the global models operated on Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the Chinese variant was operating on Dimensity 9000 by MediaTek. They both are 4nm flagship processors. It is not a mere technical front to engineer a phone that will work best with two totally different platforms, but rather supply chain insurance.
The high-end Qualcomm chips are under an unending supply pressure and geopolitical strain. Through the flagship validation with various vendors, OPPO can have bargaining power and production strength. The plan is rewarded with the new Find X9 Series, coming out world-wide October 28, 2025. The normal X9 and X9 Pro will be powered by Dimensity 9500 of MediaTek, and only the high-end X9 Ultra is using Snapdragon 8 Elite.
In order to make this vendor diversification viable, OPPO built the Trinity Engine - proprietary software that is able to offer system-level optimization of any chipset. It predicts power consumption at an accuracy of over 90 percent on the CPU, the GPU and the memory subsystem of the Dimensity 9500. And this is why you have the same flagship performance no matter who is writing the processor that it is on.
The Grand Strategy: When Custom Silicon Is non-negotiable
The Find X5 Pro is the point in time the OPPO ceased being a hardware integrator and became a silicon designer. The standard image signal processor available on Qualcomm can not match MariSilicon X in 20-bit RAW processing. Such architectural independence, dictating the ultimate image output notwithstanding the core SoC, is now a table stakes of any flagship-aspiring manufacturer.
But independence costs. The EUR1,299 cost is a direct result of colossal research and development of proprietary parts that are not listed on the spec sheets. Bulkier cooling systems, custom NPUs and other specialized stabilization hardware chew margins that the competition use to buy periscope telephony lenses.
Find X5 Pro is not successful in the market; its legacy is that computational photography can partially overcome optical limitations. It is still unclear whether that justifies flagship pricing. In the case of OPPO there is no turning back. When you develop your own silicon, you are on a years-long, as opposed to product-cycle, roadmap.
Another gamble is still going on with the X9 Series and the Trinity Engine. In case proprietary software can achieve flagship performance across a variety of chipsets with thermal efficiency, OPPO will be guaranteed true platform independence. Otherwise, they have been wasting billions of dollars developing silicon that cannot close the inherent hardware discrepancies.
In any case, the Find X5 Pro crossed the border. The era of hardware integration itself is passed. You have entered the age in which the distinguishing characteristic of your phone is a chip you never heard of, which performs computational wizardry which you never witness, solves issues which you never knew, all as your zoom lens silently fails.