ALLWINNER

Allwinner Technology is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company that designs mixed-signal systems on a chip (SoC). The company is headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong. It has a sales and technical support office in Shenzhen, Guangdong, and logistics operations in Hong Kong.

   Since its founding in 2007, Allwinner has released over fifteen SoC processors for use in Android-based tablets, as well as in smartphones, over-the-air OTT boxes, video camera systems, car DVRs, and car media players…

Product history

                  Allwinner was the No.1 supplier of application processors for Android tablets in 2012

   In 2012 and 2013, Allwinner was the number one supplier in terms of unit shipments of application processors for Android tablets worldwide. According to DigiTimes, in Q4 2013 Allwinner lost its number one position in terms of unit shipments to the Chinese market to Rockchip. For Q2 2014, Allwinner was reported by DigiTimes to be the third largest supplier to the Chinese market after Rockchip and MediaTek. DigiTimes has also projected that Allwinner will fall to the number four position in Q4 2014, being passed by Intel, as Allwinner's unit shipments continue to decline.

 A1X FAMILY

   In 2011, the company became an ARM processor licensee, and subsequently announced a series of ARM Cortex-A8 powered mobile application processors, including A10, A13, A10s and A12, which were used in numerous tablets, and also in PC-on-a-stick and media center devices. They have also been adopted in free hardware projects like the Cubieboard development board.

A2X AND A3X FAMILY

   In December 2012, Allwinner announced the availability of two ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore powered products, the dual-core Allwinner A20 and quad-core Allwinner A31. Production of the A31 started in September 2012 and end products, mostly high-end tablets from Chinese manufacturers, appeared on the market in early 2013, including the Onda V972. Allwinner was the first to make this ARM processor core available in mass production.

   In March 2013, Allwinner launched its quad-core Phablet processor A31s. Based on quad-core cortex-A7 CPU architecture, this processor allows 3G, 2G, LTE, WIFI, BT, FM, GPS, AGPS and NFC using a minimum of external components.

In October, 2013, Allwinner released its second dual-core A23, touted to be "The most efficient dual core processor" for tablets. The A23's CPU frequency was intended to run up to 1.5 GHz.

  In June, 2014, Allwinner announced the A33 quad-core SoC that is pin compatible with Allwinner's A23. The new SoC features four Cortex-A7 cores with 256 KB L1 cache, 512 KB L2 cache and a Mali-400 MP2 GPU. A new feature is the support of the OpenMAX API.Allwinner has positioned the A33 for entry-level tablets, targeting quad-core tablets priced from $30 to $60, and in July 2014 announced that it has started mass production of the chip, which will sell for as low as $4 per unit.

A8X FAMILY

   In October 2013, Allwinner disclosed its upcoming octa-core A80 SoC, featuring four high-performance ARM Cortex-A15 and four efficient ARM Cortex-A7 CPU cores in a big.LITTLE configuration.

   On June 30, 2014, Chinese brand Onda officially released its octa-core Onda V989 tablet, which is based on Allwinner A80. This is the first Allwinner A80-based tablet that is available to consumers, priced at CNY 1099 (~US$177).

   In September 2014, Allwinner announced the Allwinner A83T, an octa-core tablet processor that packs eight highly energy-efficient Cortex-A7 cores that can run simultaneously at up to around 2.0 GHz. It also includes a PowerVR GPU. The first tablet with the chip was expected to hit the market in Q4 2014.

                                                       Allwinner Product Roadmap 20131010

V-SERIES

    The V-Series are video encoding processor targeting applications such as smart DVR, IP camera and smart home applications. It is similar to the A series SoC, but adds support for functions such as digital watermarking, motion detection and video scaling, as well as a CBR/VBR bit rate control mode.

H-SERIES (OTT BOX APPLICATION)

   The H-series, introduced in 2014, are integrated application processors primarily targeted at OTT set-top box applications.

Allwinner has launched the A80 octa-core OTT box solution, targeting at high-end OTT box market, and launched the Allwinner H8 octa-core processor for mid-range OTT boxes, and most recently launched the quad-core Allwinner H3 targeting the US$35 - $50 OTT box market.

ANDROID 5.0 LOLLIPOP SUPPORT

   In December 2014, Allwinner released its Android 5.0 SDK for Allwinner A33 quad-core solution.

UPCOMING PRODUCTS

   In July 2014, Allwinner announced that its first 64-bit tablet processor was to hit the market soon.