Allwinner has begun mass production of the Allwinner A33 ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core processor and the company is selling the chip to device makers for as little as $4. That means it’s showing up in some pretty cheap tablets.

You can already find a handful of tablets with Allwinner A33 chips, Android 4.4 KitKat, chips at AliExpress for $60 or less.

a33

The Allwinner A33 chip features ARM Mali-400 MP2 graphics and support for screen resolutions up to 1280 x 800 pixels, SmartColor display technology, an integrated Hi-Fi audio codec, support for 1080p HD video playback and capture, and low power consumption.

The chip maker says a tablet with an A33 processor and 4000mAh battery should be able to get 300 hours of standby time or 6.5 hours of video playback time.

Don’t expect bleeding-edge performance from this processor. A budget chip isn’t going to rival the NVIDIA Tegra K1 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 801. But a few years ago you had to spend $150 or more to get a tablet with a sluggish single-core CPU. Now companies like Allwinner, MediaTek, and Rockchip are cranking out cheap chips that make it possible to produce dirt cheap tablet that aren’t altogether awful.

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7 replies on “Allwinner’s $4 quad-core chip now shipping in $60 Android tablets”

  1. The problem is not the soc, rather the components goes into it, cheap low res tft screen, little ram, and rom, tiny battery, cheap build, etc, kind of giving bad raps about the soc itself. I myself have an allwinner a10 and newer allwinner a23 tablet. The a23 tablet is light years ahead of the allwinner a10 and the dual core cpu is very useful. No doubt that allwinner a33 is going to be much better than the a23.

  2. So the chips that weren’t performing previously weren’t up to this “standard” of not performing?
    C’mon man, this just insures more junk on the street.

    1. Aha, but they say its “800×480 HD”, which is much better than plain 800×480 🙂

      They also only have 512MB of RAM. AND at least one of the tablets doesn’t know whether it has an Allwinner A33 or an Amlogic M802.

      AliExpress really is rubbish. I gave up on them long ago.

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