We were expecting some new processors at CES 2014, but this CES turned out to be mostly disappointing, and the vast majority of reporters present at the conference, do not seem interested in covering Chinese SoC vendors. Some information however surfaced on several foreign languages blogs and news sites about Rockchip RK3288. First, RK3288 is indeed based on ARM Cortex A12 as initially announced, and not some mysterious ARM Cortex A17 cores, but somebody at Rockchip likely made an embarrassing mistake, and Edward Weinert reported it was corrected at Rockchip booth with pieces of paper as shown below.

So Rockchip RK3288 has four of these Cortex A12 core, a 4L2K H.265 / HEVC video decoder, and an high-end Mali T764 T624 GPU supporting OpenGL ES3.0 and OpenCL 1.1 that vastly outperforms Mali-400 MP4 found in RK3188, and is even significantly faster than Adreno 330 GPU found in Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC in Kindle Fire HDX.

The first column is probably AMLogic M802 with Mali-450MP6. If you upgrade from RK3188 to RK3288, you’ll get 4 to nearly 6 times more 3D graphics performance based on GFXBench benchmarks. The company did not include the CPU performance, as Snapdragon 800 will clearly have an edge in this area.

The maximum frequency for RK3188 is 1.6GHz (despite being told it would go up to 1.8 GHz at launch), whereas RK3288 can be clocked up to 1.8 GHz, and moving from Cortex A9 to Cortex A12 improves performance from 2.5 DMIPS/Mhz to 3.3 DMIPS/MHz, meaning RK3288 is nearly 50% faster, in theory, compared to RK3188 when it comes to CPU performance.

We’ll have to get more benchmark results to get a complete picture of the performance, but we already know CPU performance should be pretty decent, and GPU performance be top of the class.

RK3288 is said to cost about $40 for now, with the price probably coming down to $35 in the second quarter. One of the first devices with RK3288 SoC will be allegedly be Yuandao M12 tablet.