EEtimes published this Interview with Rockchip’s vice president Feng Chen about the status of the Chinese ARM Processor industry:
Here are some quotes:
By volume, the Android tablet sector has grown to an estimated 80 million units, outpacing the 75 million iPads sold by Apple thus far, according to estimates by Rockchip vice president Feng Chen.
At the beginning of 2012, the target price of a 7-inch capacitive screen media tablet featuring Cortex-A8 was $99. That price has since dropped to around $65, due largely to Allwinner
“now, as end-product cycles get shorter, we do everything from designing a chip to developing a board and software that goes around the hardware — literally within a couple of months,” he explained. In March, for example, Rockchip started to design its RK3066, a dual-core Cortex A9 chip with a quad-core Mali-400 GPU. By April, it hustled to showcase sample tablets based on the chip at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. By May, the company began shipping the new apps processor to its customers.
RF31xx is a dual core Cortex A9 product designed for tablets and smartphones. Using Globalfoundries’ high-k 28-nm process, “we can reduce cost, gain performance, but most importantly, we will reduce power consumption for tablets,” said Chen. “This gives us a better chance for competing against MediaTek,” which uses TSMC’s more conservative process node.
Read the whole article at http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4397038/China-fabless–Worldwide-table-war-rocks-Rockchip-
