Charbax, the French Indo-Chinese guy speaks Chinese (the various sorts) somewhat better than he does English.   He does a lot of the reporting for various techie magazines as he lives in China now.   You will notice, he sneaks in a lot of relevant questions once he gets someone to talking to him on camera and he tends to "debullshit" the vague answer stuff as soon as it is spoken to him as he knows all about the language barrier stuff the orientals tend to hide behind.

Eva Wu is "marketing" for Allwinner, she is their designated leaker person.

The show is a relatively uncrowded local Chinese show where Charbax and Eva are staging a "leakage" event on camera in English.   If they were just talking it would have been in Chinese.

Nothing said to Charbax is ever a real leak as he reports everything he finds out through articles and blog postings, so what Eva told him is Allwinner's official story now.

Why is Allwinner important?   Allwinner is a Linaro cooperative company that posts their code and graphic interface standards on those chipsets that are aimed at open source markets.   They are the "best" of the new generation of low cost Chinese chipmakers as far as open source goes.

Rockchip is "very closed" compared to Allwinner, plus Rockchip tends to strip off interface options when they build a chipset to just what a tablet needs.  No VGA or SATA for you buddy, tablets don't need them.

Allwinner keeps all the i/o options that are inherent to the ARM designs and gives you the connections so you can build a board with HDMI and VGA and they tend to package the Standard ARM design in a reasonable fashion.   Since the very beginning you have been able to pull VGA, HDMI, SATA, and all of the other old PC style interfaces off an Allwinner chipset.

And yes, Allwinner really is talking up "Windows 9" running on an ARM Octa core processor in a laptop product.

Now, why should Allwinner be talking about something all that whacked out?   Well, maybe it isn't all that whacked at all.   Microsoft has to have put out future standards and specs for interface for their current development OS, so everybody who is smart will be making sure they can fit their more powerful processor products into that market niche.   And since Allwinner is talking it up now, obviously they are planning an 8 active all the time core big little that can do this market niche.  

As well as supporting Chrome OS and Android according to their displays ....  (remember, if it will run Chrome OS it will run a standard Linux distro as well)

They are also outing a new long battery life "tablet only" completely integrated all on the chipset dual core product which is based on a cost reduced dual core A7 product that will be in the A20 family group.   This is the A23 chipset which ia a 1.8 gigahertz "burst mode" A7 chipset.    And this puppy is their new "lowest end product" that is running as fast as the current market leading A9 products can run it and is going to cost less than the old A10 chipset cost?

Wow ...   That is some significant progress on the low end for both power and price as well as the high end big little octa core end.


So it looks like Allwinner is going after the low and high ends, leaving Rockchip the middle as their undisputed area -- this should be expected what with Rockchip partnering with ARM to bring on the new midrange A12 64 bit compatible product line into swing next year.  

Also note that Allwinner is doing all these low end, low energy but with high performance tricks at the old 40nm lithography levels, so there is 25% more progress inherent to these designs once 28nm production space becomes available to them.

Please also NOTE:   Rockchip and Allwinner are not the little newbie guys that they used to be any more.   Right now they are larger in sales than AMD, Texas Instruments and Freescale.  

Give them two more years and they will be right big monkeys indeed.

Also note all that neat tablet stuff at that show that YOU haven't seen at all yet.  The American market comes after Europe and that comes AFTER the Chinese domestic market is taken care of.   Roll out to the USA is nearly a half year after the Chinese roll outs take place.

And Eva also woopsied and let drop that the $89 retail cost Cubie Board and Cubie Truck cost <$50 US in the local chinese market place.    

Ain't that interesting?    We are at the tail end of a loooong chain of resellers and we are actually paying too much for our toys right now.