ARM Unveils Cortex A17 Processor, First Used in Mediatek MT6595 and Rockchip RK3288 SoCs

Finally all these ARM Cortex A17 marketing materials for Rockchip RK3288 were not some typos, but Rockchip marketing team may just have not received the memo reading “Confidential”, as ARM has now officially announced Cortex A17 processor based on ARMv7-A architecture, with support for big.LITTLE with Cortex A7, and that can be coupled with Mali-T720 mid-range GPU and Mali-V500 VPU. After Cortex A15, and Cortex A12, you may wonder “Why? But Why did ARM had to launch yet another new core?”. Here’s the company answer to that question: The Cortex-A17 processor offers 60% performance uplift over the Cortex-A9 processor, the current leader in mid-range mobile market, and betters the best efficiency enabling optimized solutions to address existing and new products. The Cortex-A17 processor is based on the popular ARMv7-A architecture, today’s most successful architecture in the mobile market. With over 1M apps supporting the ARMv7-A architecture, the Cortex-A17 processor is […]

Rockchip RK3288 vs RK3188 Performance Comparison

We were expecting some new processors at CES 2014, but this CES turned out to be mostly disappointing, and the vast majority of reporters present at the conference, do not seem interested in covering Chinese SoC vendors. Some information however surfaced on several foreign languages blogs and news sites about Rockchip RK3288. First, RK3288 is indeed based on ARM Cortex A12 as initially announced, and not some mysterious ARM Cortex A17 cores, but somebody at Rockchip likely made an embarrassing mistake, and Edward Weinert reported it was corrected at Rockchip booth with  pieces of paper as shown below. So Rockchip RK3288 has four of these Cortex A12 core, a 4L2K H.265 / HEVC video decoder, and an high-end Mali T764 T624 GPU supporting OpenGL ES3.0 and OpenCL 1.1 that vastly outperforms Mali-400 MP4 found in RK3188, and is even significantly faster than Adreno 330 GPU found in Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 […]

What to Expect from AllWinner, Rockchip, Mediatek, and Other Silicon Vendors at CES 2014

CES 2014 is coming soon, and it will take place on 7 – 10 January, 2014, and we can expect some interesting SoC news. Samsung suggested they will unveil their 64-bit ARM SoC (Exynos 6?) at CES 2014, Nvidia will hold a press conference to “showcase new NVIDIA Tegra mobile technologies, gaming innovations, and advanced automotive display technologies”, and Qualcomm has been quiet for now. However, several Chinese SoC vendors, namely AllWinner, Rockchip, and Mediatek, have already announced what they will showcase at CES 2014, albeit with few details. AllWinner at CES 2014 Allwinner announced will showcase their OptimusBoard based on their Ultra Octa-Core A80 SoC, as well as 4G tablets powered by Allwinner A31/A31s, and dual-SIM phablets sporting A23 dual-core. Allwinner A80 is an Octacore processor featuring four ARM Cortex A7 cores, and four Cortex A15 cores @ 2.0GHz together with an unnamed GPU offering 2x more performance over previous […]

Rockchip SoCs Comparison Table, RK32xx Quad Core Cortex A12 Coming Up in 2014

They guys at Linux Rockchip have setup a comparison table between Rockchip processors, but it’s not quite complete yet, and Rockchip noticed it, so they’ve just sent them the most recent Company Presentation that provides more details, including a roadmap. In this documentation, we can see the company targets different types of products with their SoCs: Android OTT dongle/box (aka mini PC, HDMI TV dongles…) – RK2928, RK3066, RK3068, and RK3188 Tablets – RK2926, RK2928, RK3028, RK3066, RK3168, and RK3188 EPD E-Book – RK2818, RK2906 and RK2918 MP3 player – RKnanoC On page 12 of the presentation, they have a convenient comparison table for the SoC used in mini PCs and Tablets. Series RK2926 /RK2928 RK3066 /RK3068 RK3168 RK3188 Process 55nm 40nm 28nm HKGM 28nm HKGM CPU Cortex A9 Dual Cortex A9 Dual Cortex A9 Quad Cortex A9 MAX CPU Frequency 1.0 GHz 1.6 GHz 1.2 GHz 1.6 GHz L1 […]