RockChip and Yinlips News From The HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics Fair

hktdc

Videos from this year’s HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics fair are being uploaded to Youtube thick and fast, and as usual Charbax from armdevices.net is there to interrogate the staff at all of our favourite manufacturers booths. One such video comes from the RockChip booth where we find out a bit more about some of the projects that they are working on from Vice President Chen Feng.

It looks as though RockChip are going to be spending more time on their own software, as we see their in-house picture in picture multitasking software running atop Jelly Bean. It looks similar to what LG added on their Optimus G mobile phone and allows windows to be re-sized and moved around the screen whilst retaining full interactivity. They’ve also developed a real time face recognition algorithm and are keen to show both working on a RK3188 tablet.

Multi Tasking

As well as their newly launched Quad Core RK3188, they also have an ultra low power consumption 28nm RK3168 Quad Core SoC available shortly. The video shows that the batteryless tablet draws only 280 ma whilst playing a 1080p video, which will run for “up to 10 hours” on a 3100mah battery at medium brightness.

rk3168

Over at the Yinlips booth we can see that both of these processors will feature in a pair of new 7″ gaming tablets (skip to 3:10).

The talk starts to get more interesting when we’re told about a possible change in tack from the company. “Just like Google”, RockChip are encouraging their developers to spend some spare work time on individual projects that interest them. The result of which includes a prototype low power Linux HDMI stick running on one of their older RK2928 single core processors, which Charbax gracefully attempts to wrestle out of the Chen’s hand. If the stick ever comes to market it could sell to retailers for as little as $10.

linux

We also hear about their developers experiments getting Ubuntu and Chromium running on the newer processors. The guy certainly wants to emphasise that RockChip are becoming a hacker friendly manufacturer by saying things such asĀ  “We do want to have a more open environment” and “Internally we are making an effort, trying to make our source more open”. It doesn’t look like there’s any lack of vision at the company, but whether or not they follow through with the “more open” claims remains to be seen!

The full RockChip booth video is below, for individual segments just click the links or seek to the time.

Picture in Picture Multitasking (02:53)RK3168 Ultra Low Power SoC (06:14)
Face Detection Algorithm (12:00)
Quad Core HDMI Sticks (13:50)
Linux HDMI Stick (14:10)
Hacking, Alternative OS and Source Code (22:47)

Thanks to Earl Cameron for sending this in.

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