Earlier this year Intel and Rockchip announced they were working together to develop processors for entry-level smartphones and tablets. Now Rockchip is showing off one of the first chipsets based on that partnership at the HKTDC show in Hong Kong.

xmm 6321

The XMM 6321 chipset features a XG632 dual-core ARM Cortex-A5 processor and AG620 wireless chip for 2G, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Phones and tablets with the chip should support GSM networks and they should be cheap: Charbax from ARMDevices reports we could see phones priced around $30 and tablets priced at $40 — although Charbax has a habit of mixing up wholesale and retail prices. So don’t be surprised if actual products with XMM 6321 chips cost a bit more than that.

Rockchip and Intel plan to launch 64-bit processors and chips with support for 4G LTE in the future.

via 1Pad

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24 replies on “Rockchip and Intel launch first chip together for low-cost phones and tablets”

    1. People who live in places that don’t have 4G LTE and have at best 3G and mostly 2G or nothing. That’s why many companies are targetting places like India, Indonesia, much of Africa and other places. These chips are intended to go into low cost devices that are likely targeted at these countries.

      1. You hit the nail on the head Tom. I’m in Indonesia. We do have some 4G but it doesn’t matter. The greedy carriers price their data plans too high and slap you with crippling caps. So don’t make me pay for capability I won’t use – keep the price down.

      2. And Qualcomm which dominates the SoC market for mobile devices their new Snapdragon 210 (for sub $100 smartphones) 808,810 have all also LTE-modems in-built.
        With LTE Direct will it be cheaper for carriers to implement LTE
        fortcoming years.

  2. The race to the bottom on low cost ARM gets the press but I really am more curious about the AMD ARM stuff since that seems to be actually performance competitive with the more powerful into chips….

    1. Isn’t AMD targeting servers with their current ARM plans? They may be efficient but total power consumption is still high at least when compared to what goes into phones and tablets. Or are you hoping to make a desktop PC using an ARM SoC?

      1. My sense is nothing from QCOM and the other ARM manufacturers has been designed purely for performance (wattage be damned) and therefore a true head to head with INTC performance oriented products has yet to occur. The closest we are getting to that is AMDs ARM products. I’m curious from a purely theoretical perspective on what the end results will be, since I’m really a Windows/INTC guy.

  3. Will they use the low performance of this as a ‘comparison’ for their mobile x86 processors?
    “Look, our latest x86 processors are 100 times faster than (our) latest ARM processors! Even the third party benchmarks prove it!”

          1. So how does beating the number 2 by 2 percent equate to being “totally dominated”? huh??

        2. most people’s non-apple laptops also seem to be convertible tablets these days. keeps weirding me out. so tablet market needs to be specified or you end up including all these huge bulk enterprise windows convertible purchases which accounts for everyone i know who has one. windows and osx are still the business standards so you aren’t going to see arm in that huge segment until the OS’s and important software fully port

          1. Yeah, there’s something of an “X86 lock-in” on “corporate convertibles” but that’s because of the failure of Win RT on ARM. So I include them in the “not dominated” space 🙂

            My comment was aimed at the ignorant religious zeal of the OP. Lord knows what drives these people to form such opinions.

  4. i wish it were a headline saying “intel outs arm contingency plan after rendering x86 moribund through anticompetitive dogshit; coming soon: arm cpus, nvidia gpus, intel branding”

    1. x86 is 99.9% of all running code in this world, and can easily emulate the other 0.01%.

          1. i meant another 0.01%, now i’ve done it. you are free to take it from here! lend me your citations. intel is merely being charitable towards arm, you’re thinking?

          2. Well, let’s first not get ahead of ourselves… So far the only source stating it has ARM processors in this product is Charbax, who is a known proponent of everything ARM and has on occasions gotten his information wrong…

            Intel’s SoFIA isn’t suppose to use any ARM processors, only partner up with ARM manufacturers because the new modem is originally based on the 28nm FAB and let’s companies like Rockchip get involved to help both with distribution and lowering the manufacturing costs…

            Though, it’s not yet certain this chip will be part of the Intel SoFIA releases and may actually be a Rockchip product that simply makes use of the Intel Modem as part of their new partnership…

            But make no mistake, Intel is in no way going to give up on x86 in the mobile market any time soon…

    1. ARM cores is licensed by a lot of companies from Apple to Samsung,LG,Nvidia,Texas Instruments,HiSilicon(Huawei SoC developer),Rockchip,Allwinner,Nufront etc

    2. Maybe, the Intel SoFIA SoCs are suppose to only use Intel processors but this may not be a SoFIA chip and instead a release from Rockchip, who has partnered with Intel to help with local distribution, etc. in Asia to help benefit both companies…

      So, Intel may only be mentioned because of the deal, and also the fact that Rockchip is using the Intel modem in this SoC…

      Though, the info diagram image is clearly for the Intel SoFIA and shows it labeled as Intel Processors and not ARM processors…

      Meaning, it could just be a goof by the guy who interviewed them… namely Charbax and this article is basically second hand account from him…

      Albeit, the confusion may come from the fact that the Intel Modem is originally based on the 28nm FAB used by many ARM manufacturers and is one of the reasons why Intel partnered with Rockchip to move forward with integrating the Intel modem into a SoC…

      Basically, ARM technology isn’t limited to just the SoC and licensing that technology applies to anything that ARM developed…

      Like we’re already seeing ARM technology licensed in x86 systems for hardware level security TPM (Trusted Platform Module), etc.

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