Rockchip (Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Fuzhou, Fujian province. Rockchip has been providing SoC products for tablets & PCs, streaming media TV boxes, AI audio & vision, IoT hardware since founded in 2001. It has offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hong Kong. It designs system on a chip (SoC) products, using the ARM architecture licensed from ARM Holdings for the majority of its projects.
Rockchip was one of the top 50 fabless C suppliers in 2018. The company established cooperation with Google, Microsoft and Intel. On 27 May 2014, Intel announced an agreement with Rockchip to adopt the Intel architecture for entry-level tablets.
Rockchip is a supplier of SoCs to Chinese white-box tablet manufacturers as well as supplying OEMs such as Asus, HP, Samsung and Toshiba.
Products
Featured Products
The RK3588 is the flagship SoC of Rockchip. It has a smaller version, named RK3588S. The RK3399 is the former flagship of Rockchip, and the predecessor of the RK3588.
Dual Cortex-A72 and Quad Cortex-A53 and Mali-T860MP4 GPU, providing high computing and multi-media performance, rich interfaces and peripherals. And software supports multiple APIs: OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, OpenCL 1.1/1.2, OpenVX 1.0, AI interfaces support TensorFlow Lite/AndroidNN API.
RK3399 Linux source code and hardware documents are on GitHub and Wiki opensource website.
RK3566 is a successor to the RK3288 and outperforms it significantly, with quad core Arm A55 CPUs and an Arm Mali G52 GPU. Boards based on it are expected to be on sale in early 2021 from manufacturers like Pine64, Boardcon.
RK3288 is a high performance IoT platform, Quad-core Cortex-A17 CPU and Mali-T760MP4 GPU, 4K video decoding and 4K display out. It is applied to products of various industries including Vending Machine, Commercial Display, Medical Equipment, Gaming, Intelligent POS, Interactive Printer, Robot and Industrial Computer.
RK3288 Linux source code and hardware documents are on GitHub and Wiki opensource website.
RK3326 and PX30 were announced in 2018, marketed for AI. PX30 is a variant of RK3326 targeting IoT market, supporting dual VOP. They use Arm's CPU Cortex-A35 and GPU G31.
RK3308 is an entry-level product line for mainstream devices. The chip has multiple audio input interfaces, and greater energy efficiency, featuring embedded voice activation detection).
The announcement of RV1108 indicated Rockchip's move to AI/computer vision territory.
With CEVA DSP embedded, RV1108 powers smart cameras including 360° Video Camera, IPC, Drone, Car Camcoder, Sport DV, VR, etc. It also has been deployed for new retail and intelligent marketing applications with integrated algorithms.
Early Products
RK26xx series - Released 2006.
RK27xx series - Rockchip was first known for their RK27xx series that was very efficient at MP3/MP4 decoding and was integrated in many low-cost personal media player (PMP) products.
RK28xx series
The RK2806 was targeted at PMPs.
The RK2808A is an ARM926EJ-S derivative. Along with the ARM core a DSP coprocessor is included. The native clock speed is 560 MHz. ARM rates the performance of the ARM926EJ-S at 1.1 DMIPS/MHz the performance of the Rockchip 2808 when executing ARM instructions is therefore 660 DMIPS roughly 26% the speed of Apple's A4 processor. The DSP coprocessor can support the real-time decoding of 720p video files at bitrates of up to 2.5 Mbit/s. This chip was the core of many Android and Windows Mobile-based mobile internet devices.
The RK2816 was targeted at PMP devices, and MIDs. It has the same specifications as the RK2806 but also includes HDMI output, Android support, and up to 720p hardware video acceleration.
RK29xx series
The Rockchip RK291x is a family of SoCs based on the ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core. They were presented for the first time at CES 2011. The RK292x are single core SoCs based on ARM Cortex-A9 and were first introduced in 2012.
The RK2918 was the first chip to decode Google WebM VP8 in hardware. It uses a dynamically configurable companion core to process various codecs. It encodes and decodes H.264 at 1080p, and can decode many standard video formats including Xvid, H.263, AVS, MPEG4, RV, and WMV. It includes a Vivante GC800 GPU that is compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG. The RK2918 is compatible with Android Froyo (2.2), Gingerbread (2.3), HoneyComb (3.x) and Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0). Unofficial support for Ubuntu and other Linux flavours exists. As of 2013, it was targeted at E-readers.