Allwinner Technology are a Chinese chipmaker with a history of producing processors and system-on-chips for a number of Android devices, in-car entertainment units and similar.
Allwinner Technology has announced Android 5.0 Lollipop is going to be available for tablets, using the Allwinner A33 processor. This being a quad core ARM Cortex-A7 unit and we’ve seen this used in some of HPs smaller, budget tablets. As well as the less powerful processors in the Allwinner range, they’ve also confirmed that Lollipop will be compatible with the A80 octa-core processors and have demonstrated Android TV running on an A80 processor.
The company says Android 5.0 Lollipop will be available for tablets with Allwinner A33 quad-core and Allwinner A80 octa-core processors. Allwinner has also demonstrated Android TV running on a device with an A80 chip. It’s not surprising that Google’s latest tablet and TV software can run on Allwinner’s chips. Google designs Android to be able to run across a wide range of devices.
What’ll be interesting to see is whether this means well start to see Chinese device makers release inexpensive smart TV boxes with Google’s official Android TV software. We’ve seen hundreds of smart TV devices from companies such as Rikomagic, Tronsmart, and Minix in recent years, but they’ve usually shipped with the full smartphone/tablet version of Android and a custom user interface rather than a version of Android truly designed to run on televisions.
As for Allwinner’s chips and their obvious capabilities when it comes to running Android TV, it remains to be seen whether device manufacturers will opt to load the vanilla version of Android, or to make use of a custom user interface.
