Organization
Rockchip
Shanghai-listed Chinese semiconductor company whose processor is used in Microduck.
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Background on Rockchip
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Rockchip (Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Fuzhou, Fujian province. It has offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hong Kong. It designs system on a chip (SoC) products, using the ARM architecture licensed from ARM Holdings for the majority of its projects.
Rockchip was one of the top 50 fabless IC suppliers in 2018. The company established cooperation with Google, Microsoft and Intel. On 27 May 2014, Intel announced an agreement with Rockchip to adopt the Intel architecture for entry-level tablets.
Rockchip is a supplier of SoCs to Chinese white-box tablet manufacturers as well as supplying OEMs such as Asus, HP, Samsung and Toshiba. Rockchip has been providing SoC products for tablets & PCs, streaming media TV boxes, AI audio & vision, IoT hardware since founded in 2001.
Products
The RK3588 is Rockchip's current flagship SoC. It has feature-reduced versions, including RK3582, RK3588S, and RK3588S2.
The RK3399 is Rockchip's previous flagship SoC, and predecessor of the RK3588.
Dual Cortex-A72 and Quad Cortex-A53 and Mali-T860MP4 GPU, provide computing and multi-media performance, interfaces and peripherals. The GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, OpenCL 1.1/1.2, and OpenVX 1.0, while the AI interfaces support TensorFlow Lite/AndroidNN.
RK3399 Linux source code and hardware documents are on GitHub and Rockchip's open-source Wiki.
RK3566 is a successor to the RK3288 and outperforms it significantly, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU and an Arm Mali-G52 GPU. Boards based on it are expected to be on sale in early 2021 from manufacturers like Pine64 and Boardcon.
RK3288 is a high-performance IoT platform, Quad-core Cortex-A17 CPU and Mali-T760MP4 GPU, 4K video decoding and 4K display out. It is applied to products of various industries including Vending Machine, Commercial Display, Medical Equipment, Gaming, Intelligent POS, Interactive Printer, Robot and Industrial Computer.
RK3288 Linux source code and hardware documents are on GitHub and Wiki opensource website.
RK3326 and PX30 were announced in 2018, marketed for AI. PX30 is a variant of RK3326 targeting the IoT market, supporting dual VOP. Both use Arm's Cortex-A35 CPU and Mali-G31 GPU.
RK3308 is an entry-level product line for mainstream devices. The chip has multiple audio input interfaces, and greater energy efficiency, featuring embedded voice activation detection).
The announcement of RV1108 indicated Rockchip's move to AI/computer vision territory.
With CEVA DSP embedded, RV1108 powers smart cameras including 360° Video Camera, IPC, Drone, Car Camcoder, Sport DV, VR, etc. It also has been deployed for new retail and intelligent marketing applications with integrated algorithms.
RK27xx series - Rockchip was first known for their RK27xx series that was very efficient at MP3/MP4 decoding and was integrated in many low-cost personal media player (PMP) products.
The RK2808A is an ARM926EJ-S derivative. Along with the ARM core a DSP coprocessor is included. The native clock speed is 560 MHz. …
Open-source commitment
Rockchip provides open source software on GitHub and maintains a wiki Linux SDK website to offer free downloads of SoC hardware documents and software development resources as well as third-party development kit info.
On December 18, 2025, FFmpeg filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request at GitHub against Rockchip for copying thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec in its Media Process Platform video acceleration libraries and applying another license over the code. GitHub disabled the repository. FFmpeg allege they were ignored for two years.
Markets and competition
In the market for SoCs for tablets, Rockchip faces competition with Allwinner Technology, MediaTek, Intel, Actions Semiconductor, Spreadtrum, Leadcore Technology, Samsung Semiconductor, Qualcomm, Broadcom, VIA Technologies and Amlogic.
After establishing a position early in the developing Chinese tablet SoC market, in 2012 it faced a challenge by Allwinner. In 2012, Rockchip shipped 10.5 million tablet processors, compared to 27.5 million for Allwinner. However, for Q3 2013, Rockchip was forecast to ship 6 million tablet-use application processors in China, compared to 7 million for Allwinner, who mainly shipped single-core products. Rockchip was reported to be the number one supplier of tablet-use application processors in China in Q4 2013, Q1 2014 and Q2 2014.
Chinese SoC suppliers that do not have cellular baseband technology are at a disadvantage compared to companies such as MediaTek that also supply the smartphone market as white-box tablet makers increasingly add phone or cellular data functionality to their products.
Intel Corporation made investments into the tablet processor market, and was heavily subsidizing its entry into the low-cost tablet market as of 2014.
In May 2014, Intel announced an agreement with Rockchip to jointly deliver an Intel-branded mobile SoC platform based on Intel's Atom processor and 3G modem technology. Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will deliver an Intel-branded mobile SoC platform. The quad-core platform will be based on an Intel Atom processor core integrated with Intel's 3G modem technology, and is expected to be available in the first half of 2015. Both Intel and Rockchip will sell the new part to OEMs and ODMs, primarily into each company's existing customer base.
As of October 2014, Rockchip was already offering Intel's XMM 6321, for low-end smartphones. It has two chips, a dual-core application processor (either with Intel processor cores or ARM Cortex-A5 cores) with integrated modem (XG632), and an integrated RF chip (AG620) that originates from the cellular chip division of Infineon Technologies (which Intel acquired some time ago). The application processor may also originate from Infineon or Intel.
From the Wikipedia article Rockchip (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).