Three of Asia’s top chip makers are launching new processors during the week of the Consumer Electronics Show.
Allwinner has a new 64-bit chip priced at just $5. Rockchip is launching its first octa-core processor. And MediaTek has new chips aimed at smart TV devices and at wearables.
Allwinner A64
Allwinner’s latest chip is a quad-core, ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit processor aimed at low-cost devices. It supports Android 5.0, eMMC 5.0, and Allwinner says the processor also supports 4K H.265 video, but I’ve heard that claim made about other low-cost chips that had iffy performance.
The chip is available for just $5 to system builders, which means we’ll likely see some very affordable tablets with this processor from device makers looking for something a bit more powerful than Allwiner’s older A20 or A31 chips.
MediaTek MT2601 for Android Wear
This system-on-a-chip has a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A7 processor with Mali-400 graphics, support for screen resolutions up to 960 x 540, and Bluetooth.
It’s a small, low-cost, low-power chip designed specifically for wearables such as smart watches running Android Wear software.
MediaTek MT5595 for TVs (including Sony Bravia)
MediaTek is also introducing a more powerful processor aimed at smart TVs with 4K displays. This chip has a two ARM Cortex-A17 and two lower-power ARM Cortex-A7 processor cores arranged in a big.Little arrangement.
It supports HEVC and VP9 codecs for 4K video playback at 60 frames per seconds.
Rockchip RK3368 octa-core
RockChip’s first octa-core chip features eight ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at up to 1.5 GHz.
Like many of the other chips announced this week, Rockchip says the RK3368 supports 4K video playback and H.265.
last year allwinner announced a33 chip for tablets, still we can find only very few tablets containing this chip in market.
Interesting that the Rockchip is named 3368 not 3388, means they must have a faster one soon named RK3388.
8 A53 at 1.5 ghz would be consider pretty slow by today standard.
Perf wise it’s not actually and the Marvell 8xA53 is at 1.5GHz the Snapdragon 615 shows up mostly at 1.5GHz (and only 4 cores clocked at that), Mediatek does have higher clocks and i doubt anyway that a 3388 would be about clocks.
A $5 chip that has decent performance…tis is why INTEL and AMD should be very worried, they will have to adapt or they are in deep trouble. I cannot see how AMD is going to make it, yes they have an ARM license but the amount of competition is going to push them out of the industry. As for INTEL I am not “buying” this nonsense about how I need a $200 core chip to use windows…
They don’t need to worry as much if the GPU is still closed and it continues to be a huge pain to do simple fiddling with it. I tried to play with some of the earlier arm chips for fun but all the BS i had to go through to do anything hugely turned me off. I never ran into those problems ever with any x86 platform.
But are not this Allwinner and Rockchip 64-bit SoC according to ARM big.LITTLE concept with cores both for longer time between battery charges and gpu-cores for advanced graphic?
They say they have HEVC support but what level do they support? probably lowest.
i’d like to point out a mistake. MediaTek is not a Chinese company, but a Taiwanese company.
Thanks, I’ve corrected that line to say “three of Asia’s top chip makers” instead of China’s… it’s a bit more vague, but I’m too exhausted from CES coverage to think of a better solution right now. 🙂
You have been really cranking out the stories. I can barely keep up and I am just reading them! All your hard work is really appreciated. You have made Lilliputing the best tech site for phones/tablets/mini-PCs around.
Thanks!
I’m shocked to realize I’m almost caught up… I’m about to schedule the last post based on photos/video I shot yesterday.
Of course, it’s only 9:00 AM in Las Vegas and as soon as that’s done I’m going to go out and gather more material. 🙂