14 DAY TRIAL // Back in July we were telling you that low-cost tablets might be getting 4K video decoding capabilities thanks to the upcoming Allwinner 64-bit ARM processors the company plans to unveil until the end of the year.
Now, as recent events seem to indicate, it appears Rockchip will also be unveiling a similar chip that will be capable of supporting 4K.
CNX-Software notes it just received from T-chip, the company behind the Firefly-RK3288 development board, a brochure detailing the company’s history throughout the years regarding its tablet solutions, but also highlighting upcoming products.
Three new chips are in the pipeline
But one of the slides reveals some interesting information we did not have knowledge of until now. The RK3288 chip is the current standard on the market, but we never heard of the RK3126, RK3128 SoCs or the MayBach one.
The first processors we mentioned are both manufactured using 40nm processes, so it is believed they will probably be used in future budget tablets.
They are built to support Quad-Core A7 processors working with Mali GPU that support HEVC decoding up to 1080 resolution. They also enable Android 4.4.2 to work on the respective product running on the chip, but this is the same standard available in the RK3288 chip.
MayBach is the most interesting of the upcoming chips
But the most interesting of the chips outlined in the slide, is the one touted as the “MayBach.” This might be temporary nickname for one of Rockchip’s upcoming chips, but at this point your guess is as good as ours.
MayBach appears to be an architecture manufactured using the 28nm process and based on the info provided in the slide, it should turn out to be an Octa-core Cortex A53 processor working with an unnamed GPU compatible with OpenGL ES 3.0.
Supported features include HDMI 2.0 / LVDS / DSI / eDP video output and ISP with CSI2 camera interface(s0). Last but not least, the chip should bring about 4K/H.265 video decoding capabilities, which means users of future tablets running on the MayBach platform will be able stream 4K to an external third-party display or even shoot video in 4K.
However, in order to view video in 4K, users will have to stream the media via HDMI on a 4K TV, because the tablets won’t support that resolution.
Sadly, we don’t have any more information related to when this chip becomes available. As the Allwinner 4K capable chip is expected to make a debut until the end of the year, we could hypothesize Rockchip will be taking the same path.