14 DAY TRIAL // Intel is continuing its tablet saga, by announcing a new “strategic” partnership with competitor Rockchip, in an atypical move that migrates from the company’s usual way of doing business.
Until now, Intel was one of the few chipmakers that designed, manufactured and sold its silicone products by itself. As a comparison, AMD and Qualcomm design their chip products, but then ship them off to third-party partners like GlobalFoundries and Samsung to have them manufactured.
But in a drastic change of events, Intel announced it has partnered with low-cost Chinese chip maker Rockchip for next-gen Intel processors that will make it into low-budget Android tablets.
What that means is that Rockchip will be the first to make use of Intel technology in order to produce its own chip products with Intel processor cores. And Intel will be coming out on top from this partnership, since the finished products will bear Intel’s branding and not Rockchip’s.
Even more specifically, Intel plans to work with Rockchip in order to produce Intel’s upcoming entry-level quad-core Atom-based “SoFIA” chip that will arrive with integrated 3G modems.
SoFIA will be a processor that will show up in entry low-level tablets, which makes sense. After all, Rockchip is a company known for making inexpensive ARM processors, so we won’t see the two chip-makers working on some high-end chip architecture anytime soon.
We already know Intel plans to start shipping out dual-core SoFIA chips starting Q4 of 2014 and the LTE quad-core versions will soon follow in the first half of 2015.
The third SoFIA chip iteration with be a quad-core 3G chip produced by Rockchip and is also set to arrive in the first half of 2015.
As Intel is increasingly trying to penetrate the growing tablet market, the company has recognized the need to dominate the price-sensitive, entry-level tablet space, where the war is quite fierce. As more and more companies push out products with decent specs and a low price tag, Intel is trying to find ways to maintain its business afloat.
Intel’s CEO Krzanich pointed out Rockchip has a strong relationship with Android tablet OMEs and ODMs based in China. So, it appears Intel is hoping to cling on to Rockchip’s reputation in order to take up a piece of the tablet pie, without having to start building connections in China from scratch.
Both Intel and Rockchip will be selling the new SoFIA architecture, with Rockchip obviously focusing on Asian markets.