June 3^rd 2014

Intel announces strategic agreement with China’s chip design company Rockchip, under which the two companies will work together on expanding the products’ breadth and accelerating the developing time.

The two companies will produce an Intel-branded mobile system on a Chip (SoC). This quad-core chip will be based on an Intel Atom processor core integrated with an Inter 3G baseband technique. The new quad-core SoFIA 3G components will come out in the first half of 2015, and it aims at the entry level and low-end tablets and communication market.

After the announcement, Rockchip exposed the outcome of their mutual efforts—the so-called world highest integrated 6321 smartphone and communication tablet solution, the double-core WCDMA SoC processor, integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, PMU and some other components.

According to the image of development board, the 6321 processor has integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and PMU with only two chips. Along with a slightly larger SoC processor, the double-core WCDMA solution get most of chips done with these three chips. The integration is really very high.

It is learned that this chip is a Rockchip designed double-core A5 WCDMA SoC which uses Intel’s baseband. It has been delivered to TSMC current sheet, and aimed at the market of low-end smartphone. Great integration could be its biggest advantage, it only has two chips. Most of other WCDMA solutions on the market still use 4 chips, for instance, Media Tek’s MTK6572 consists of four parts: main chip, baseband, WiFi/BT, and PMU.