14 DAY TRIAL // Last summer we were telling you the low-cost chip maker was working towards a 64-bit chip that would bestow cheap Android tablets 4K video capabilities.
Well, the Allwinner A64 chip is now official as a quad-core tablet-friendly piece of silicone that’s made up of ARM Cortex A53 CPU cores.
The neat thing is that the chip has been made to support Android 5.0 Lollipop and the latest Linux 3.10 kernel.
We have yet to see an avalanche of Android 5.0 Lollipop slates arrive on the market and the current ones (like the Nexus 9) are pretty premium, but with the A64, budget Lollipop slates might be a reality soon.
As we mentioned above, the A64 has support for 4K video via HDMI and H.265/H.264 hardware video decoding.
Allwinner is also throwing in eMMC 5.0 support, its own SmartColor technology (aims to deliver vivid, eye-pleasing visual experience). The chip company is selling the A64 to tablet manufacturers for just $5 / €4.
Allwinner calls the A64 the most cost-efficient tablet processor out there and it might as well be right in this. We’ll keep an eye on the first real-life tablet models bundling the new architecture.