Xiaomi on Tuesday unveiled in Beijing the the Mi 5c smartphone, which is based on the company's own Pengpai S1 processor, developed by its subsidiary Pine Cone Electronics.

The Chinese cmompany works to streamline production, lower prices, and gain greater control over handset design to counter the impact of slowing sales.

"We need to master the core technologies of our industry and tightly integrate the development of our hardware with our software helping us to make even better smartphones," Xiaomi Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun said in a statement.

Jun said the chip, developed under the goal of keeping a balance between performance and energy consumption, took just 28 months.

He disclosed that the company started R&D on key technologies on the chip, the screen, the camera, the battery, the connector and artificial intelligence in recent years. Within that period, the company was was granted 3,612 patents in China and overseas, and also applied for some additional 16,000 patents.

"We named Pine Cone's first chip Peipai S1, to show our full excitement when we saw it could make a phone call on Sept 24, 2015, and light the screen on Sept 26, 2015."

The processor comes with 8 Cortex A53 cores, half of them clocked at 2.2 GHz and the other half at 1.4 GHz. The GPU is Mali-T860, and there is VoLTE support. It is made on the 28 nm HPC process and has "lower power consumption for daily use," according to the company.

Xiaomi said that the new octa-core chip is competitive with chipsets in the same range from market-leader Qualcomm. Xiaomi said its tests showed the Surge S1 outperformed Qualcomm's Snapdragon 625 - the company claims its chip is beating Snapdragon 625 and Helio P2O with 64,816 points in the AnTuTu benchmark.

Xiaomi became the fourth company in the world to manufacture the whole smartphone plus the chip after Apple, Samsung and Huawei.

The Mi 5c smartphone will be available as of March 3, at a price tag of 1,499 yuan ($218). It has a 5.15" display, a 12 MP f/2.2 main camera and a 8 MP f/2.0 snapper on the front for all the selfies on Weibo. There is a fingerprint scanner on the front and you have 3 GB RAM and 64 GB internal storage. The battery of Mi 5C is 2860 mAh and the device comes with Android 7.1 Nougat and MIUI out of the box.

Xiaomi Redmi 4X

Redmi line-up was very well received, so it should not be a surprise that Xiaomi wants to expand the series.

The new Redmi 4X does not have that many features of differentiation, besides the new 4100 mAh battery.

Under the hood Redmi 4X has a 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 425 clocking at 1.4 GHz, joined by Adreno 505 GPU. The top version will have 3 GB of inbuilt memory 32 GB of flash storage. Redmi 4X also supports microSD card if you need extra room.

The 13MP main camera, boasting f/2.0 aperture and PDAF focusing, works in tandem with a 5MP front shooter with even bigger f/2.2 aperture.