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Chinese chip maker Rockchip is showing off its upcoming quad-core RK3188 processors. The company expects to start sending samples to hardware partners in February, which means that we could see these quad-core chips show up in tablets and other devices in March, April, or May.

Rockchip has a demo of a touchscreen display hooked up to the new processor, but the software hasn’t been fully optimized to take advantage of the chip’s features… so it doesn’t really look like anything special yet.

The RK3188 is a 28nm quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 chip with speeds up to 1.8 GHz.

It has Mali 400 quad-core graphics with speeds up to 500 MHz, and support for OpenGL 2.0 and OpenVG 1.1.

The chip can handle 1080p HD video playback at 60 frames per second, or 1080p HD H.264 and VP8 encoding at 30 frames per second. It can also handle dual panel displays and resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 pixels.

Rockchip includes and embedded GPS baseband.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPpgiQK14bE]

While Rockchip isn’t as well known in the West as competing chip-makers Qualcomm, Samsung, or NVIDIA, the company’s low cost chips have proven very popular with budget tablet makers. We’ve seen dozens of Chinese tablets featuring Rockchip’s dual-core RK3066 processor in recent months, and some relatively well known device makers including Archos using the company’s chips.