OPPO has closed its chip design unit, which produced MariSilicon.

Oppo's flagship and mid-range handsets use its own-developed MariSilicon X Neutral Processing Unit (NPU) technology for superior mobile photography to differentiate themselves.

Unfortunately, it looks like Oppo is discontinuing its in-house chip design business, as the Chinese smartphone manufacturer was said to have unexpectedly shut down its Zeku division.

Employees at Zeku were given less than a day's notice, and the difficult choice was taken owing to "uncertainties in the global economy and smartphone market," according to the newspaper.

Oppo was said to have spent over USD 1.4 billion in the firm, which produces in-house co-processors, ISPs, and different chips.

The MariSilicon X, which debuted on the Oppo Find X5 Pro, was the most significant chip. According to Oppo, the Imaging NPU provides the foundation for achieving extraordinary results, with 18 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to enable its AI algorithms and a power efficiency of 11.6 TOPS per watt.

Furthermore, the NPU's processing capacity is stated to be unconstrained by memory throughput because it has its own dedicated DDR with additional bandwidth of up to 8.5GB/s.