‘Having the latest chipset will cost a lot more’: Poco gets real about the ‘pressure’ of rising memory costs as it launches the F9 Ultra with an unchanged chipset

Poco has officially launched the Poco F9 Ultra and F9 Pro, two performance-focused phones that deliver “all-round upgrades in display, imaging, and battery life.” Notably, the Xiaomi sub-brand doesn’t actually name-drop ‘performance’ in that list of F9 Series improvements, no doubt because the F9 Ultra, specifically, arrives with the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset as its predecessor, the Poco F8 Ultra .

Poco flagships have historically launched with the latest Snapdragon chipsets, so this year’s F Series marks something of a strategy shift for the Chinese company — and Poco hasn’t been shy about disclosing the reasons for this change.

In short, Poco has decided against equipping the F9 Ultra with Qualcomm’s new (and as-yet-unannounced) flagship chipset because 1) rising RAM prices have increased the cost of doing so, and 2) it believes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 remains powerful enough to deliver the level of performance Poco users expect.

And I wholeheartedly agree with this take.

Here’s Poco’s full comment on why the F9 Ultra has an unchanged chipset, which was given in a press conference for the F9 Series by the company’s Senior Product Manager, Kang Lou, and Global PR lead, Olivia Jiang: KL: I’d like to explain this.

The overall situation is that rising memory costs are putting a lot of pressure on all of us [in] the smartphone industry.

Poco is not escaping [these costs].

From our end, we believe performance is not always about chasing the latest chipset — of course, that’s important – but operationally speaking, having the latest chipset will cost [us] a lot more on the latest phone.

We believe performance is a combination of everything: a powerful chipset, a powerful cooling system; the gaming experience is important too — gaming is a proving ground for us, to prove that overall performance is great.

OJ: For Poco, it’s not just about any single factor or any chipset roadmaps.

Our product timing isn’t something we see as fixed; we continually evolve our launch plans based on what’s best for our users.

We don’t make launch decisions based on the next generation of hardware, and we deliver [products] when we believe they are ready to deliver the performance our users expect.

The Poco F9 Ultra remains highly competitive, and the price is competitive, too.

So we’re confident that this generation will deliver the flagship experience that users need.