After the first RK3288 Android TV boxes started to be promoted on Alibaba, and the first RK3288 board was shown, Rockchip is currently showing their quad core Cortex A17 processor in reference designs, tablets, and TV boxes running Android or Chromium OS at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair.
Charbax interviewed the company, and the first demo was a development board connected to an LCD display running Chromium OS, which is said to handle 30 tabs without issues.
Rockchip RK3288 is now advertised as being a quad core Cortex A17 with a Mali-T764 GPU, but when Rockchip representative was asked, he strangely denied to comment on whether it was a Cortex A12 or A17, as both are very similar. He also said the GPU was a Mali-T760MP4… If this seems all confusing that’s because it is… Some interesting things are H.265/HEVC support for 4K2K videos, and HDMI 2.0 for 4K @ 60 fps video output.
Moving on, some TV boxes and boards, such as the reference designs pictured above, were quickly shown, followed by several Android tablets that can boot in about 8 seconds.
Finally, we’ve been told the products should be available in the next few weeks. Based on several comments from people involved in development of such devices, I’d expect the first RK3288 devices to be available early summer (end of June, beginning of July), which tablets possibly becoming available a little earlier.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I think a little more than 1 month will be needed to have RK3288 products running well. Anyway, it’s here!
I really hope that true HEVC / H.265 VPU hardware support among new cheaper SoC’s will become standard much faster than it took for H.264 so that all OEM media player manufacturers will see it as a must for the price
However I guess what is really needed is for Digital Television broadcasters or a new Blu-ray Disc format to begin using HEVC / H.265 before it will become more popular than what it is today