Rockchip has taken over the Chinese tablet market back last year from Allwinner who happened to be the tablet SoC leader one year earlier. When Rockchip came up with their RK3288 chipset this year and Allwinner with their A80T chipset only a few weeks later, it looked like Allwinner would take the leader position for themselves once again.
Surprisingly this didn’t happen, as the Allwinner A80T seems to suffer from bad drivers, performance issues and lots of compatibility issues, as we all have been able to see during the launch of Onda’s V989. As a result no one seems to be interested anymore and we can see a lot more RK3288 devices popping up than A80T devices.
This once again enables Rockchip to remain on their throne. But it doesn’t stop there, as the company has three more chipsets in the pipeline. One of them is their next high-end SoC called the Rockchip Maybach. This is a 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 SoC thrown in the arena to be a serious competitor for upcoming Mediatek and Qualcomm Chipsets. This SoC will not only boast eight cores, but support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and 4k video as well.
The other two upcoming chipsets are aimed at the low-cost and mid-range market, being quad-core SoCs based on the ARM Cortex A7 architecture. The first one we are going to see is the RK3126 in October, the second one is called the RK3128 and scheduled for a release in November.
Seems like we all can look forward to an exciting Christmas season with lots of new Chinese tabs becoming available as well as exciting few first months of 2015. The competition will for sure create some very amazing devices we will be able to get our hands dirty with.