Rockchip had their annual event yesterday offering a view of past achievements, as well as a glimpse into the future with new products announcements. The company is ready to go to the next level with their Rockchip RK3588 featuring Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 cores, 8K video decoding support, 4K user interface support, an NPU 2.0 (Neural Processing Unit) manufactured using an 8nm LP process.

The processor should have eight cores in a 4+4 dynamIQ configuration according to a tip from “coldfish”, and the new 8nm process is expected to increase performance by 20 to 30 percent, while the power consumption will be reduced by 40 percent. Mass production is expected for Q1 2020.

The company also showed a slide with their video encoder/decoder IP, and Gen3 should be in RK3588 since that’s the only one with an 8K 60 fps decoder using either AVS3 or H.266 (VVC). I’m quite confused with the Gen1 decoder since it shows AV1 implementation too, and as such should be new as well. An 8K 60 fps video encoder is also in the works.

While RK3588 was clearly the highlight of the show, it was not the only worthwhile addition to Rockchip SoC portfolio, as RK3530 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with a Mali-G52 GPU, 4K HDR, USB 3.0, SATA, and Gigabit Ethernet is planned for Q3 2019.

Other notable announcements included RK2108 Arm Cortex-M4 audio chip, and RV1109 dual core 4K H.264/H.265 camera SoC with NPU 2.0 A.I accelerator which are also planned for the second half of this year.

The company also introduced their first wireless MCU with RK2206 Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller with 802.11 b/g/n WiFi targeting Internet of Things application and scheduled to sample in Q3 2019.

A few more details and slides can be found in that article in Chinese.