Rockchip recently announced new chips and roadmaps at the annual developers conference in Fuzhou. The Chinese manufacturer is mainly represented in white-box devices such as Chromebooks or set-top boxes as well as tablets and designs ARM-based SoCs, which are then put into production at contract manufacturers.

As a new application processor top model (AP), the RK3588 is the successor of the RK3399: It contains four Cortex-A76 – and four Cortex-A55 cores and a NPU 2.0 (Neural Processing Unit) for artificial intelligence. The chip is intended for 4K UHD user interfaces and is manufactured by Samsung in the 8LPP process. The same Node use the South Koreans for their own Exynos 9820 Galaxy S10. The RK3588 should be available soon; Rockchip assumes a quarter more speed than the RK3399 with 40 percent lower power consumption.

For set-top boxes Rockchip plans the RK3530 with four A55 cores and an unspecified Mali G52 graphics unit. The SoC supports HDR, has an NPU integrated, and integrates DDR3 and LPDDR4X memory. The RK3530 is also manufactured by Samsung, but in the older 14 LPP process. The manufacturer plans a 25 percent higher performance with a 35 percent reduction in energy requirements compared to its predecessor. The RK3530 should be available in the third quarter of 2019.

Other chips include the RV1109, a vision-computing design for artificial intelligence, and the RK912 as the first Bluetooth 4.x and b / g / n Wi-Fi SoC. The RK2206 also features a Cortex-M4F-based chip for Internet of Things devices. The F-suffix stands for Float, which is the floating point unit that is optional for the M4 kernel.