Top 6 Commercial Tablet Android Solution Processors:White Paper, Design Norm & Performance Comparison

	Rockchip RK3288	Rockchip RK3188	Amlogic S905	Allwinner A83T	AllWinner A33	Amlogic 8726MX
Processor	Quad-Core Cortex-A17, 1.8GHz	Quad-Core Cortex-A9, 1.6GHz	Quad-Core 64Bit Cortex-A53, 2.0GHz	Octa-Core Cortex-A7, 1.6GHz	Quad-Core Cortex-A7, 1.5GHz	Dual-Core Cortex-A9, 1.6GHz
GPU	ARM Mali-T764	ARM Mali-400	ARM Mali-450MP6	PowerVR SGX544	Mali400MP2	Mali400MP2
RAM	2G	1G	2G	1G	1G	1G
Video	4Kx2K H.264/H.265 10-bit	1080P @ 60fps	UHD 4K 60fps hardware decoding, H.265 10-bit	1080P @ 60fps	1080P @ 60fps	1080P @ 30fps Hardware decoding
Connectivity	WiFi a/c	WiFi b/g/n	WiFi a/c	WiFi b/g/n	WiFi b/g/n	WiFi b/g/n
Gigabyte Lan	Supported	Not Supported	Supported	Not Supported	Not Supported	Not Supported
HDMI 2.0	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No
Applications	Commercial & Retail Tablets	Commercial & Retail Tablets	Commercial 4K UHD Media Player	Android POS Terminal & Commercial Tablet	Android Touch Controller For Home & Industrial Automation, entry-level retail tablet	Android Touch Controller For Home & Industrial Automation, Retail tablets

Among all the ARM processors listed as above for commercial tablet advertising, we would like to put RK3288 on the top of the performance ladder, due to the obvious key factors including 4K video decoder, 5G WiFi (802.11 ac)  & Gigabyte Lan for multi-cast IP streaming. The other reason why RK3288 gains the top position is that tablet advertising professionals learned from the mistakes, failures, and drawbacks of what they got from the long learning curve of RK3188, the No.2 runner of the commercial tablet performance racing.

Rockchip RK3288 mother board diagram

And RK3288 is introduced together with Android 5.1, this version of Android carried some expectations that are not available in the widely accepted & popular Android 4.4: screen pinning (multi-screen), and there are quite more apps available based on such a newer version.

The benchmark of commercial tablet is Allwinner A20 powered tablet display and Rockchip RK3188 based retail tablet. When Allwinner is more developer-friendly, A20 is widely used for tailor-made commercial, retail & industrial applications when peripherals & device communication are needed.

Allwinner A20 Mother Board Design Norm

Rockchip RK3188 as a follower, starts retail & commercial application from a designed-for-price consumer-line mother board. Thanks to Rockchip’s partnership with Intel which sends a clear signal to industry that Rockchip gained entrenched advantage in reputation which influences the end-users and the buyer-preference based marketing finally helps Rockchip won over the market share of commercial tablet market that was previously occupied by Allwinner family.

RK3188 Classic mother board with extension interface for RJ45

RK3188 mother board with 3G module slot

Allwinner A83T, the Octa-core processor, entered the market with a super short boot up time(as short as 10s), for comparison, RK3188 is almost in the same level as A83T in performance.

Allwinner A83T mother board diagram side A

Allwinner A83T mother board diagram side B

With A83T targeting the middle & high-end market, Allwinner released A33, the down-performance model of Allwinner A20, it was designed for small sized screens like 10.1” or below sized retail tablet, business hospitality tablet used for room management (touchscreen controller for example).

Allwinner A33 mother board diagram

Amlogic family, owned by Chinese and headquartered in US, it entered the commercial tablet market earliest since 2012 when dual-core processor was new to mass market. Amlogic is operated in a westernized way to buy up-to-date advanced IP for its ARM processor, it is NOT developer friendly, but it is built with managed engineering & due consideration for long-term-win strategy. We choose it for openframe touch panel at the early stage when hardware options are very few. We built abundant communication interface for various commercial applications, see the following circuit diagram.

In early 2014, after CES, 4K became a tech-topic in the industry, RK3288 took the lead again, but due to its market-first strategy, it is mass production ready until later 2015 for commercial use. During this time, Amlogic learned the market and released 64-bit quad-core S905, it gained the top position in 4K set-top-box market thanks to its great success in tele-operator market. Amlogic’s main know-how for commercial application is the color reproduction and hardware video decoding. Our MP40 is one of the very few commercial use 4K media player that can run for months without failure. But due to the fact that Amlogic S905 does’t have built-in LCD panel interface, it lost the power for high-end commercial tablet, while RK3288 takes the lead again and occupied the market.

In a long-term, the solution design norm for mass market belongs to Rockchip, from RK3188 to RK3288.