Chinese chip makers ride wave of low-cost tablets

December 18, 2013

Qualcomm and Nvidia get most of the headlines in the mobile chip business, but two Chinese vendors are cornering the market for processors used in low-cost tablets, and in 2014 they might find their way into a product near you.Samsung Electronics and Apple design their own chips. Most other well known mobile devices, like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus series, use chips from Nvidia and Qualcomm. But less well-known is the booming market for cheap tablets that’s being fuelled by Chinese chip makers Rockchip and Allwinner.If you own a sub-$200 tablet then you might already be using one of their chips. These so-called “white box” tablets, labeled with brands such as PronoTec, KingPad and Dragon Touch, are meeting the huge worldwide demand from consumers who are unwilling or unable to pay for a top-end product.The demand is significant. Allwinner and Rockchip will each sell 50 million tablet processors this year, according to research firm Canalys, making them the joint second-largest tablet chip suppliers in the world behind Apple, which will sell a projected 70 million iPads in the same time frame.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2081440/chinese-chip-makers-ride-wave-of-lowcost-tablets.html#tk.rss_all