There has been much buzz regarding the Allwinner A31 Cortex-A7 Quad-Core chip. It is the latest low-cost entrant into the Chinese Chip market by Allwinner (also known as Boxchip or Sochip) and it is particularly interesting due to its PowerVR SGX544 MP2 GPU which boasts very good graphics performance. The low-power and also low-clocked A7 cores should provide good battery life as they should sip power relative to their higher-performance Cortex-A9 based brethren like the RK3066, RK3188, and Samsung Exynos 4412.

As a result of the lower price and decent performance, many upcoming models are slated to use this chipset and we are investigating selling units with it onboard.

First, let me state my feelings on the matter. First, the A31 is, at best, a slightly "upward" but still extremely "sideways" move if you are coming from the RK3066. Its performance is "neck-n-neck" vs the RK3066. On a "per-core" basis it gets slaughtered because the Cortex-A7 is significantly lower performance than the Cortex-A9 per clock cycle, AND, the chip is only clocked at 1.2 ghz per core vs the 1.6 Ghz of the RK3066. So more performance per clock cycle and a higher clock speed means that for single or dual threaded applications (which is the majority of all android apps) it under-performs significantly vs the RK3066. However, in multi-threaded applications that are able to take advantage of all four cores, it does come out ahead by a decent margin of about 10% all the way up to %40 depending on the type of test. So for heavily multithreaded applications you do come out ahead but very few users will see that benefit. In regards to the GPU performance. The 2D results are slower than the RK3066 (probably because it is PowerVR vs a Mali and the Mali excels at fill rates) and the 3D performance is quite good with a 20% improvement. I would expect anywhere from a general 3 - 15% improvement in most games vs the RK3066. Now, it DOES also excel at SD Write speeds (double that of the RK3066) and that can make a big difference in day-to-day use.