Yup, it's a new midrange chipset, to replace the A12 that Rockchip never moved to bring forward once it was given to them (understandably since all Rockchip's competitors immediately leap frogged right over the A12 by going A-15/A-7 Octa-core big/LITTLE all over it).

This one swings the newest "sea of cores" technology and an even better Mali 720 GPU as the stock setup.   It can pair with A-7 and A-15 in any sea of cores type configuration and it can share co-processing duties with 700+ series Mali GPU cores.

ARM's Mali is engaged in a death struggle with VR graphics, with both players taking turns improving graphics in leaps and bounds.   The boys have both GONE PAST what screen resolutions you can afford to battery power and are dicing out faster frame rates and lower energy usage now.

What is interesting about the A-17 is that the partner this time was Mediatek and as per Mediatek's general way ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was said by anyone until after the trial production runs and the early vendor prototyping was completed and production samples were ready.    

This explains the big silence for the last 6 months.

So, in the exact same day ARM announces a new mid-range ARM chipset and Mediatek announces a completed Octa-core A-7/A-17 big little chipset that is done and ready for sampling.

This is what Intel hates about fighting on ARM's turf -- Intel is building huge clunker chipsets that require a lot of extra hardware on the motherboard (and requires an energy nanny chipset) to do the job at all.   And Intel has to loss leader the pricing, losing 15-20% on each chip to help pay for all the extra hardware. 

So, by the time Intel even starts to get it right, ARM has rolled a whole new generation of chipsets that hit the disputed niche exactly with real energy efficiency and better graphics.   And with full on chip integration of Wifi and 3-4G and GPS, etc etc etc that Intel simply can't do yet.

Also of note -- Mediatek has completed their 20nm fab plant, it is in full production and this new chip comes out at 20nm from the get go.

Intel is still currently working with 22nm .....


        .... ouch, that's gotta sting a whole bunch.  

Intel crows on and on about their technological excellence yet they just got reality lapped ON TWO FRONTS by a Chinese Cheapie guy.  

The sad thing is it's all pride.

Intel could be filling their big silicon wafers up with the very best of the ARM designs

..... but their pride will not let them.

Yup, what's corking the bottle is the lack of general use ARM OS and what blocks that is the lack of standards in the ARM/Android world.

Google is trying to address the fragmentation/lack of standards by giving out requirements to get into Google Play, etc that give the hardware makers something to shoot at.

http://liliputing.com/2014/02/lilbits-2-10-2014-end-to-android-fragmentation-...



Adding to this emphasis is Google teaming up with VMWare to turn all those cheap 22" screen Android all-in-ones into Windows Office running slim client type machines.

http://liliputing.com/2014/02/run-windows-apps-in-the-cloud-with-chrome-os-vm...



You can jest hear 'ol Microsoft screaming and thrashing in the snow at this news -- done tore out half the stitches to the new head -- busted them plumb loose before they had even finished sewing them all into place.


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Now Microsoft (new head firmly sewn on and still struggling to get back up again) has put out another feeler to see if this nugget is possibly a feasible thing.

http://liliputing.com/2014/02/support-android-apps-save-windows-windows-phone...




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It is all pop-talk right now, BUT we got Worldwide Mobile Congress in Barcelona Spain coming up in two weeks, so look to see somebody forming a committee and perhaps taking a stride forward towards REAL STANDARDS for ARM/Android devices such that a real OS or two could be quickly written.

Ubuntu will be there, as will the Mozilla Foundation -- either or both of which could drop an functional FOSS OS on us very quickly if all the players would simply agree to support a standard form of "something akin to a bios" so some common software would have some consistency to be written to.

Expect MS to be there shagging away as a disruptor and expect Intel to be there wanting things to favor them in some fashion.  

Google is still going to be there playing Switzerland, although they ARE going take actions to roll back the actual FRAGMENTATION LEVEL of Android which should help a great deal towards heading towards an OS writable set of standards for all them myriad hardware and software app writing guys.



MS has certainly signaled privately that they want into Google's android app world in the biggest baddest sort of way.

Somebody is going to want to find out how much counter-sharing MS is going to be willing to do.






Turning XP into a fully legally released FOSS distro would be a good start, don't you think?

Just release what you got, legally, and tell the world that XP/NT/Win2000 is a FOSS project now under the GNU or Apache license.

You would be amazed how quickly the FOSS folks in Wine Project and Reactos Project could fill in any of the missing pieces that MS cannot find -- Wine has been closely following each Windows version n the Wine Project since 3.1 after all.

Reactos Project had to have their project independently line by line code audited to make sure NO MS CODE WAS USED, even by accidentally re-inventing it.   To do this the audit company had to have the Windows code to compare against.

It is all out there .....  somewhere.  


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MS won't really do this, what with them having a real "dog in the manger" mentality.

(IBM would, could  and they did ---  they have turned over a great deal of their legacy software code to the Open Source folks over the last 10 years).