Rockchip has made a name for itself by offering cheap, yet powerful processors for tablets, TV boxes, and other devices. The company’s RK3188 is one of the fastest ARM Cortex-A9 chips on the market right now, but it’s used in devices that don’t cost and arm and a leg.

So what does Rockchip have in store for 2014? According to a new roadmap, Rockchip is working on a quad-core ARM Cortex-A12 chip series called the RK32xx.

Rockchip RK32xx
Rockchip

Rockchip sent the document to the folks at Linux Rockchip, and CNX Software spotted the bits about the RK32xx chip.

ARM’s Cortex-A12 architecture is designed for mid-range smartphones and tablets. It’s not as fast as the Cortex-A15 technology used in chips like the NVIDIA Tegra 4 or Samsung Exynos 5 Octa. But the new chip should be faster than anything Rockchip currently offers.

Among other things, the upcoming 28nm chip will support 4K video decoding, 1080p video encoding, and DirectX 11 graphics (as well as OpenCL, OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, and more).

The RK32xx chip features a 1.8 GHz quad-core processor with ARM Mali-T624 graphics, and the first RK32xx chips are expected to hit the streets in the second quarter of 2014 later this year.

 

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9 replies on “Rockchip working on quad-core ARM Cortex-A12 RK32xx chip”

  1. Wanted to clarify the following line in your article – “the first RK32xx chips are expected to hit the streets in the second quarter of 2014.”

    The spec sheet says ES Q2 2014. Note that this means Engineering samples are going to be delivered to the customers in Q2 2014…its certainly not going to be shipping in any devices to the public. And from what I’ve read its going to be late Q2 at the earliest. Any devices with this chip will not be available in retail until at least late Q4 2014.

  4. Wonderful things that never appear. The fatigue of science fiction future ads.

  5. Rockshit usually never release their GPL to public, that’s a shame.

    And there is no official support from cyanogen (another set back).

    And the last thing is rockcshit always got some problem with android OS and their software engineer are very slow (read NEVER) fix those android problem. For example RK3188 still got problem opening PDF after so many years and it is not fix yet up to today,

    Rockshit earned a lot of money and yet their support SUCKS BIG TIME !!! And people still buying and never complained to them. This is why vendor become more and more arrogant. They think without us as their customer they will survive.

    1. They’re just following the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” line. If their sales aren’t hurting and people aren’t complaining, why should they waste their time and resources on problems no one cares enough to complain to them about?

    1. A12 is intended for mid-range devices, here are some relevant links…

      https://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a12-processor.php

      https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/ARM-Cortex-A12-and-Mali-T622-Announced-Shipping-2014

      https://www.anandtech.com/show/7009/arm-cortex-a12-between-cortex-a9-and-a15-in-power-perf-sampling-in-late-2014

      https://www.extremetech.com/computing/157217-arm-cortex-a12-and-mali-t622-the-mid-range-muscle-that-arm-desperately-needs

      1. It looks like ARM is hitting a power efficiency wall for mobile devices. Wouldn’t be an issue on desktops and far less of a problem on laptops, but those are not traditionally ARM markets. There’s always hope for process shrinks.

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