To stand out, Oppo’s Find X5 Pro relies on a unique NPU

This article shows How Oppo’s Find X5 Pro bets on a custom NPU to stand out. Oppo is the largest and first subsidiary of BBK, the Chinese smartphone giant that also owns Vivo, OnePlus, Realme, and, most recently, iQOO.

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Although most people are familiar with Samsung and Apple, BBK is already the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer. Oppo has played a large part in this, and with BBK’s resources at its disposal, the business has attempted to carve out its own niche in the congested smartphone market.

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is a one-of-a-kind smartphone. According to Ben Wood, Chief Analyst of CCS Insight:

“Coming hot on the heels of the innovative Find N folding phone, the Find X5 family delivers Oppo’s flagship range for 2022. These devices are designed to go head-to-head with Samsung’s Galaxy S22 smartphones and will be key products for Oppo as it seeks to further grow its share in Western European markets.

“Oppo is well-positioned to assume Huawei’s lead as a leading Android challenger to Samsung,” he continues. To raise consumer knowledge of its brand and products, the corporation must now ramp up its marketing efforts.”

Find X5 Pro by Oppo

On the surface, there aren’t many differences between it and its predecessor. It has a similar smooth sculpted look to the Oppo Find X3, but it lacks an excellent microscope camera. Internally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (in most locations), 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage are mostly what you’d expect from an annual spec hike.
But it’s Oppo’s unique (and dreadfully titled) MariSilicon X Neural Processing Unit that steals the show (NPU). The powerful chip is designed to tackle computational photography tasks.

In terms of CPU performance, we’ve long passed the point of diminishing returns, and just raising a phone’s GeekBench score won’t help much — especially when the majority of the competition is utilizing the same hardware. It’s also why Google went its own way with the Tensor processor, focusing on AI-related tasks rather than typical phone benchmarks.

Marisilicon X NPU Oppo Find X5 Pro

In theory, the MariSilicon X will enable Oppo to accomplish things it couldn’t with Qualcomm’s technology. Traditional smartphone CPUs, according to the business, were bottlenecking the results its photographic algorithms could provide since they weren’t suited for those types of computing operations.
Qualcomm has made strides with its latest chip in this regard, but it’s not hard to see how a dedicated NPU could deliver better results. Oppo claims the MariSiliconX can process certain imaging algorithms 20x faster than the Snapdragon 888 in Oppo’s last flagship — all while using less power.