Allwinner is giving one of its chips for low-priced tablets a bit of a spec bump, and competitor Rockchip is outlining plans for its first quad-core ARM Cortex-A12 chip.
Both chip makers produce low-power, ARM-based processors that are popular with makes of Android tablets, TV boxes, and other gadgets, and both are showing off some of their upcoming goods at the HKTDC show in Hong Kong this week.
Allwinner A23 hits 1.8 GHz
Allwinner introduced a 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A7 dual-core processor called the A23 in September. Now the company says it also offers burst performance of up to 1.8 GHz.
The rest of the specs are pretty much what we expected. It’s a 40nm chip with ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics and support for 1280 x 800 pixel displays and 1080p HD H.264 video playback.
Rockchip RK32XX coming in early 2014
In July Rockchip announced plans to release a quad-core ARM Cortex-A12 processor. Now the company says it’ll be ready to hit the streets early next year.
The 28nm chip features ARM Mali-T624 graphics, supports display resolutions as high as 3840 x 2160 pixels, and has built-in support for 4G LTE networks.
ARM’s Cortex-A12 architecture is basically the little sibling of Cortex-A15. It’s not quite as powerful as what you’d get from a Samsung Exynos 5 or NVIDIA Tegra 4 chip, for instance, but the RK32XX will be faster than any other Rockchip processor on the market.
Any info on SATA or USB3.0 support?
I have both 3066 and 3188 Rockchip Mini PCs and I’m very pleased with the performance on both of them.
This should be pretty interesting.
Both the 3066 and the 3188 were great SoC, the 3066 is legendary, beating many quad-core chips. If only they supported linux development…