Qualcomm gets all the attention from the media these days, but there are other chip companies out there who serve their particular markets extremely well. You’ve likely heard of MediaTek and their efforts to dethrone Samsung’s octa-core crown, but what about Rockchip? Rockchip is a Chinese company that makes silicon for devices that usually don’t leave the country, but that’s starting to change with devices like the HP Slate 7.
According to CNXSoft, the company recently gave a presentation where they spilled the beans on a chip called the “RK32XX”. It’s the first chip, as far as I can tell, that uses ARM’s new Cortex A12 processor. What is a Cortex A12? As the number suggests, it’s faster than ARM’s Cortex A9, which has been powering smartphones for multiple years, and ARM’s Cortex A15, which simply eats too much power. People have said that an A12 is about as fast as Qualcomm’s best Kraits today, but without proper benchmarks, that’s hard to say. Why do I bother bringing this up? Because as competition increases in the smartphone and tablet landscape, you’re going to see manufacturers trying to shave pennies off their build of materials, and that means you’re going to start seeing chips from companies you’ve never even heard of, like Rockchip. It may not happen this year, but next year, and most certainly 2015, the Asian invasion will happen.
