Rockchip sells some of the lowest-cost SoCs for mobile devices. That's disappointing for a piece of hardware surfacing in 2015, but Rockchip most likely chose it because of cost considerations. Unfortunately, the -A17 core isn't based on the new and improved ARMv8 architecture, and it's still a 32-bit chip. Initially, Rockchip was supposed to use the Cortex-A12 core, but since ARM announced Cortex-A17 quite suddenly, improving Cortex-A12, Rockchip quickly updated its SoC to use the newer IP instead.Ĭortex-A17 will target the mid-range market in 2015, while Cortex-A57 remains at the high end, possibly improved. It comes with a quad-core Cortex-A17 processor at 1.8 GHz, and a Mali-T760 GPU. The RK3288 is Rockchip's latest and most powerful SoC, and is expected to surface this year. It's designed to ship in smaller, 7-inch tablets, which tend to be less expensive.
RK3168Ĭonsidering it has only a dual-core Cortex-A9 processor complex and a GPU that’s more commonly included with Cortex-A7-based SoCs, the RK3168 is a more budget-conscious revision of the RK3188.
In fact, the only RK3188 devices that shipped with only 1 GB of RAM were budget HDMI media sticks.īenchmarks put this chipset around the 14,000- to 18,000-point mark in AnTuTu, landing beyond Tegra 3's space at a lower price. The bump in GPU speed and CPU power meant that more devices with 1920x1200 screens were released, and the RK3188 SoC handled that gracefully, partly because almost all those devices came standard with 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Excitement for this 28 nm quad-core Cortex-A9, Mali MP4-equipped SoC was so high that there was a record-breaking number of preorders for devices like the Cube U30GT2 and PIPO M4 Pro.