Allwinner has big plans for the following months, as they intend to begin mass production of their new quad core processor for low cost tablets. Production starts in July and the company claims that the Allwinner A33 chip will be available to device makers for just $4.99.
Allwinner plans to showcase its power and potential on reference tablets, that may cost as little as $40 to build. For those wondering, the Allwinner A33 chip is a quad core ARM Cortex A7 CPU with ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics. This is a chipset that’s pin compatible with the A23 dual core chip, so the devices with the older chip may get a swap with the new CPU. The Allwinner reference platform indicates that in the future we’ll see cheap tablets with specs that include 8 inch 1280 x 800 displays, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage.
There’s also a 7 inch reference design with a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage, plus a 7 inch 800 x 480 pixel version with the same amount of RAM and storage. The specs estimate sent by Allwinner to the press shows prices among $40 to $50 for those tablets, but when they reach the shops they’ll be a few dozen dollars more, certainly less than $100.
