If you purchased the MagicX XU Mini M recently, this news might come as a surprise. A hardware and software teardown of the newly released handheld console revealed that the advertised RK3562 CPU is, in fact, a lower-specced, older RK3326 processor. Following this news, MagicX has reportedly severed ties with its 3rd party development company, claiming they are just as taken aback as their customers.

@TheGammaSqueeze posted this information on X/Twitter via RetroHandheld's Discord. In the post, another discord user, xSilas43, had uploaded an image of the fake RK3562 CPU in the XU Mini M alongside a legit RK3566 and RK3562 chip for reference. Take a look for yourself:

The images above show how the lettering of 'Rockchip' on the fake RK3562 differs from its legitimate counterpart, with the main differences being character spacing and some font design elements. These suspicions were later confirmed by the kernel teardown, as mentioned earlier.

The RK3326, released in 2018, is built on a 28nm process with quad-core Cortex-A35 (1.3 GHz) and a Mali-G31 GPU. The RK3562, on the other hand, is way more recent. Launched in 2023, the ARM-based CPUis built on a 22nm process and features a quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz - a notable boost over the RK3326. Paired with a more powerfulMali-G52GPU, it can handle higher resolutions way better. The RK3562 also supports faster LPDDR4/4x RAM and UFS storage.