Three chips, 160 GB of memory, and 33,874 holes in aluminum. Xiaomi introduced the AI Cube

Just a month ago, the Xring O3 chip was only whispered about. Now, Xiaomi not only introduced it at its own conference but immediately integrated it into a device that has nothing to do with phones. The AI Cube is a cubic mini PC, powered by three different chips from Xiaomi’s workshop, and whose sole task is to run artificial intelligence locally – meaning directly on your desk, not on a remote server.

Three chips, three different tasks

The division of labor is particularly interesting, as it goes against the established trend. While compact stations built on Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chips handle everything with a single piece of silicon, Xiaomi has separated general computations and artificial intelligence tasks among distinct components.

The main processor is the Xring O3 with a ten-core CPU, a sixteen-core GPU, and a neural unit with a performance of 200 TOPS. Data transfer is handled by the Xring O100, manufactured using a 6nm process with a spatially stacked design, which is expected to achieve throughput of up to 1.22 TB/s. And finally, the Xring D100, a chip manufactured using a 3nm process with a twenty-core CPU, capable of addressing up to 160 GB of unified memory and running models up to 200 billion parameters in size. The entire system is designed to sustain a power input of 150 W.

Where Xiaomi is heading

A comparison with the competition shows that Xiaomi is not playing in its own league; it’s just approaching the same goal differently. NVIDIA DGX Spark and Asus Ascent GX10 offer 128 GB of unified memory and can also handle two-hundred-billion-parameter models. The difference is that Xiaomi built its own silicon for this instead of buying an off-the-shelf solution – and that’s quite an ambitious step for a company that, until recently, had no proprietary processors.

No expense was spared on the construction either. The body is milled from a single piece of aerospace-grade aluminum, and Xiaomi boasts exactly 33,874 drilled holes for heat dissipation. The fact that someone took the trouble to count them says quite a lot about the company’s culture.

Before you start saving

Let’s temper our enthusiasm. The AI Cube is an engineering prototype, meaning a demonstration of what Xiaomi is capable of, not a product for sale. The company has not announced the price or launch date, and conference materials indicate that the O100 and D100 chips will only become commercially available in 2027. Until then, let’s consider the AI Cube a calling card that Xiaomi is waving towards Nvidia and AMD – for now, more ostentatiously than practically.

Would you run artificial intelligence at home on your own computer, or does the cloud suit you?

Source: Notebookcheck, Lei Jun (Weibo), IT Home