“Innovating together, winning together.”

That’s how Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich defined the relationship between Intel and China during the kickoff keynote of IDF Shenzhen 2015.

“Since last year, we’ve made a lot of progress together. It’s been a good year full of innovation and full of partnerships and collaborations together,” Krzanich said on stage.

Though interference from the US government may block Intel from parts of the lucrative high-performance computing market in China, on stage Krzanich said that Intel and China maintain a strong relationship and high levels of cooperation.

“The local and global impact of our 50 years of Moore’s Law innovation and 30 years of strong collaboration and winning together in China is unmatched,” said Krzanich. “Intel remains focused on delivering leadership products and technologies in traditional areas of computing, while also investing in new areas and entrepreneurs – students, makers and developers – to find and fuel future generations of innovation with China.”

Krzanich began the keynote by highlighting the how Intel met or beat its goals from last year.

In terms of Intel’s goal to hit 40 million tablets shipped with Intel silicon inside, that goal was met and exceeded as the company announced in January as Intel says it hit not only the 40 million mark, but exceeded initial estimates by hitting 46 million.

With regards to the Smart Device Innovation Fund established last year, Intel said that so far it has been “very successful” with $37 million of the $100 million fund disbursed so far. Many of the companies highlighted by Intel as recipients of the funds are relatively unknown outside of China. Eyesmart technology, Appscomm, were some of the firms highlighted by Intel.

Updates on collaboration with Rockchip

At last year’s IDF Shenzhen, Krzanich gave a first preview of SoFIA its first SoC solution with an embedded 3G baseband. SoFIA was Intel’s plan to get a foothold into the value-oriented Chinese market.

Later in the year Intel announced that it would be collaborating with China’s Rockchip to further develop SoFIA, with Rockchip taking the lead.

Rockchip CEO Min Li

On stage at IDF Shenzhen, Krzanich and Rockchip’s CEO said that they had scored hardware wins from from 20 companies, with more than 45 tablet, phablet and smartphone designs currently in development based on the Intel Atom x3 processor reference designs.

Krzanich then demonstrated the Intel Atom x3 processor in a smartphone, supporting LTE-TDD connectivity over China Mobile’s network by streaming a song from a popular Chinese music streaming service.

A new fund for makers

Following in the footsteps of the Intel Innovation Fund for smartphone and tablet vendors, Intel announced a program to accelerate the development of maker projects powered by Intel’s Galileo and Edison platforms. It’s not clear how these funds will be disbursed, but Intel said it is investing $20 million (120 million RMB) into the project.

Real Sense gets thinner and an enterprise partner

Intel’s RealSense technology has been a favourite staple of the company during its keynotes at events like IDF and Computex. While Intel has secured a handful of wins for its 3D camera, interest from vendors has otherwise been scant. One of the few wins Intel was able to secure for the technology was the Dell Venue 7000, which had many other selling points other than the inclusion of the camera.

At this year’s IDF Shenzhen Intel announced that it had developed a new version of the camera that’s thinner and lighter than the previous version.

Intel also announced that China online mega retailer JD.com would be using Intel RealSense technology in its wharehouses to organize and sort supplies into boxes.

IDF Shenzhen 2015 continues through Wednesday and Thursday in Shenzhen.

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Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) unveiled Tuesday two new low-cost Chromebooks that will make the Google laptop platform much more competitive against the low-end Windows laptop space.

The two Chromebooks are from Hisense (SHA:600060) and Haier (HKG:1169),two China-based OEM/ODMs known best for providing budget electronics to specific retailers. Both Chromebooks are priced at $149 and are powered by the quad-core Rockchip RK3288 SoC clocked at 1.8GHz.

Each laptop is virtually identical with 11.6-inch LED-backlit display, 2GB of DDR3L SDRAM, 16GB of eMMC flash storage, and a 720p webcam. The only difference between the two is battery life.

First up is the Hisense Chromebook, which will be exclusively sold at Walmart (NYSE: WMT). It promises 8.5 hours of battery life. It’s 0.6 inches thick and weighs 3.3 pounds.

The Haier Chromebook 11, an exclusive to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), has 10 hours of promised battery life.

What’s in a Rockchip?

Rockchip is probably best known for its deal with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) to bring x86 to the next-generation of cheap tablets for the Chinese market.

Aside from that Rockchip is a fairly run-of-the-mill low-end ARM (LON: ARM) manufacturer that would one day like to challenge the incumbents such as Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and MediaTek (TPE: 2454).

The Rockchip RK3288 has four 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex A17 cores and a quad-core ARM Mali T760 GPU.

Benchmarks on the RK3288 are scant, but one from January from a firm called CNX Software shows that its around 18% faster in Antutu than an Intel Atom Z3735F.

Chromebook on a stick

The other Rockchip RK3288 powered Chrome device is the Chromebit, and HDMI dongle that brings full Chromebox (a set-top Chrome computer) to a dongle. It’s powered by a Rockchip 3288 SoC, has 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and 802.11ac connectivity.

One obvious use case for the Chromebit is presentations. Instead of trying to get one’s laptop connected to the venue’s projector, someone could just plug in the Chromebit into the projector’s HDMI port.

Pricing of the Chromebit will be less than $100.

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The PC Gaming Alliance, also known as the PCGA, known for championing the cause of the PC platform and specifically gaming on the PC, has changed their name to the Open Gaming Alliance and have refocused their efforts. In a short but concise statement, the Alliance has announced that they will be changing their name to the Open Gaming Alliance and refocusing their efforts on open gaming in general instead of just focusing on the PC. After all, most of the PCGA’s members now are involved in gaming in one way or another outside of the traditional PC formfactor.

“As the market for digital games grows on a variety of mobile platforms and as the PC is no longer the most dominant gaming form factor, the PC Gaming Alliance, (PCGA), a nonprofit corporation dedicated to driving the worldwide growth gaming, is pleased to announce the name of the organization has been changed to Open Gaming Alliance, or OGA.”

Now that the PCGA is called the OGA, maybe they can attract someone like Qualcomm to contribute to their efforts and increase the visibility of gaming on all platforms. And of course, they now have a new mission, even though most of their members remain the same.

“Our mission is to keep the gaming ecosystem “open” and the most profitable platform for publishing games. Our focus is across multiple OSs such as: Windows, Mac OSX, SteamOS, Linux, etc.; and for all form factors including desktops, laptops, tablets, and 2-in-1s. We provide a unified leadership voice for the industry.”

Clearly, Intel is still driving a lot of the conversation here as they have in the past with the PCGA, and of course it makes sense, but it doesn’t change the fact that their dominance of the PCGA and OGA will very likely keep away someone like Qualcomm or Mediatek, or even Rockchip. Having global partners will be incredibly important for the OGA and I’m frankly surprised that they haven’t gotten Facebook onboard yet with Oculus and other platforms. It will be interesting to see how the OGA will change their analysis of the industry and what their new focuses will be since the PC is no longer a focal point. They should also get more manufacturer onboard other than Razer, which should also elevate the level of the alliance’s importance. The fact that they also don’t have someone like Valve onboard is also a bit shocking, so it seems like maybe they have some outreach work to do. Hopefully they will grow now that they’re more ‘open’ and we’ll see more members joining shortly.

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