14 DAY TRIAL // It really seems that the mobile computing game is seriously heating up, with more surprise being prepared for CES 2011, where, among numerous other tablet-related announcements, Rockchip will also unveil its future mobile Internet platform, the RK29xx.
If you've not exactly familiar with Rockchip, you should know that we're talking about a fabless semiconductor company and mobile-internet SOC solution provider founded in year 2001 and headquartered in Fuzhou China.
Rockchip focuses on mobile Internet Platform with products targeted on Mobile Internet terminals (smartphone/MID/Internet TV/e-Book) and portable multimedia entertainment terminals (MP3/PMP), the company's chips actually powering many of the Chinese PMPs, smartphones and Internet tablets currently available on the market.
Of course, the fact that most of the products featuring Rockchip hardware are low-cost clones of brand products is not exactly relevant, proving, in fact, that the company's platforms are versatile enough to support a wide array of applications.
Now, back to the company's CES announcement, the RK29xx series solution, set to be unveiled at demoed in Las Vegas, in January 2011.
This new product will apparently support Android 2.2 and Google TV products, since it integrates a powerful CPU with Rockchip's specialized 2D and 3D GPU processors to enable up to 1080p HD decoding of popular video formats on mobile Internet devices (MID), Smartphones and Internet TV devices.
Furthermore, according to Rockchip, the RK29xx is the world's first system-on-a-chip (SOC) to support decoding of the WebM VP8 video codec entirely in hardware, which also applies all digital TV standards including ATSC-T/MH.
Of course, we're quite eagerly waiting to see just what this new mobile platform from Rockchip is all about, but given the company's history and ties to the Chinese market, we're pretty sure that it will wind up within a very large number of Chinese tablets, smartphones, MIDs, eBook readers, etc.