Recently, Rockchip expressed optimism about the long-term development trend of AIoT, predicting that by 2025, the scale of China’s AIoT market will exceed 3.2 trillion yuan, and by 2030, it will rise to 8.6 trillion yuan. Is the AIoT market really that promising? In such a favorable market, how does Rockchip’s combat capability measure up? Today, we will discuss the 60 application scenarios and competitive landscape of Rockchip’s core chip RK3588 across nine major fields.
The “8K+AI” dual-engine fire has spread from the living room to factories and from hospital wards to oil fields. Since its launch three years ago, the Rockchip RK3588, with its 8 nm AIoT SoC, has opened up battle lines across sixty segmented tracks simultaneously. It faces off against established players like Amlogic, Qualcomm, and HiSilicon, while also keeping an eye on emerging AI competitors like Horizon Robotics, Ascend, and Jetson. What will be the outcome? What is the market share? Today, we will analyze each scenario one by one.
1. Living Room: 8K TV Boxes Take the Lead
Amlogic T7 still holds 55% of shipments, but RK3588 has achieved a 45% increase in new products for 2025 with 8K@60 fps decoding and triple-screen display, with a growth rate of 85%. The gap is visibly narrowing. More importantly, the system-level adaptation of OpenHarmony allows manufacturers to achieve mass production in just three months, and the “core” of TV boxes is about to change hands.
2. Kitchen: Refrigerators, Ovens, and Hoods Make a Comeback
Midea and Haier have shifted 80% of their orders for 2025 smart refrigerators to RK3588, for a simple and straightforward reason: one chip can drive a 4K touchscreen, AI ingredient recognition, and three-channel wireless, cutting BOM costs by 15%. The visual oven is a unique showcase for RK3588—its 48 MP ISP combined with pre-set food models allows traditional oven manufacturers to develop “AI eyes” within two weeks, achieving a 70% penetration rate for new products, far ahead of the competition.
3. Industrial Parks: A Vacuum Left by HiSilicon’s Supply Cut
Safety helmets on construction sites, facial recognition access control in communities, and boundary detection have traditionally been HiSilicon’s territory, but a vacuum has emerged due to the depletion of SS928 inventory. RK3588, with its 32-channel 1080p decoding and 6 TOPS NPU, is expected to achieve a 38% replacement rate in edge boxes for industrial parks by 2025, becoming the top domestic choice. The supply cut crisis has become a tailwind for RK3588.
4. Factories: Quality Inspection, Robotic Arms, and Predictive Maintenance in Crisis
In the visual quality inspection sector, RK3588 and SS928 are tied at 35% each; in predictive maintenance, although Zynq has a large inventory, RK3588 has captured 40% of new cases with LSTM 3 ms inference and ten years of Yocto long-term support; in the robotic arm guidance market, Intel’s i.MX 8M Plus still holds 45%, but RK3588 has increased speed by 4 times using GPU+NPU heterogeneity, with a growth rate of 80%, rapidly closing the gap.
5. Automotive: Qualcomm’s Fiercest “Domestic Shadow” Behind
Smart cockpits and ADAS are Qualcomm’s fortress, with SA8155P and 8195 taking over 60%+ market share. However, the automotive version of RK3588M has reduced costs by 30%, and through AEC-Q100 Grade 2 and ASPICE L2, it has already achieved mass production in models like BYD’s Yangwang U8 and Great Wall’s Mecha Dragon by 2025, capturing 25% market share and firmly establishing itself as the top domestic choice. The “Qualcomm monopoly” in cockpit chips has finally shown signs of cracking.
6. Medical: Eye Screening and Smart Medicine Cabinets Overtake Competitors
The eye AI screening device, after obtaining NMPA Class II certification, has entered 40% of the market within a year, pushing foreign GPU solutions below 50%; due to HiSilicon’s supply shortages, RK3588 has won 45% of bids for smart medicine cabinets with dual-factor authentication and medical insurance interfaces, topping the market for the first time. The medical sector is extremely stringent regarding certifications and interfaces, and RK3588 has opened the doors to hospitals with its “compliance + computing power” dual keys.
7. Energy: Photovoltaics, Oil Fields, and Tunnel Crack Detection Flourish
In photovoltaic power station inspections, Xuri 3 and RK3588 are tied at 40%; in oil leak monitoring, RK3588 has secured 50% of new cases with 6 TOPS local inference and integration with Sinopec’s protocol stack, leading for the first time; in tunnel crack detection, RK3588’s 4K@60 solution has captured 45% market share, dethroning Zynq. The energy sector places great importance on “wide temperature + fanless + integrated algorithms,” and RK3588J’s industrial-grade specifications of -20°C to 80°C have become a passport.
8. Live Streaming and XR: The Only 8K Encoding Box
HiSilicon Hi3559A’s discontinuation has created a vacuum in the 8K live streaming encoding box market, making RK3588 the only domestically producible solution, capturing 65% market share by 2025, with almost all 8K streamers on Bilibili and Douyin using the orange box. In the VR streaming sector, Qualcomm XR2 still holds 70%, but Pico’s latest generation lightweight headset has switched to RK3588 to reduce costs by 30%, marking the first time domestic market share has reached 30%.
9. Universities and Open Source: The “Default Option” for Next-Generation Developers
Jetson Nano was once standard in university robotics courses, but by 2025, RK3588 has taken 35% of experimental board orders. The reason is simple—official ROS2 BSP one-click burning, with a 200-page experimental manual fully open-sourced, allowing students’ graduation projects to run YOLOv8 directly, relieving teachers from the hassle of downloading NVIDIA images of 20 GB.
10. Winning Moves: Three Axes Carving Out Sixty Blood Paths
Reviewing the sixty urban battles, RK3588’s killer moves have always revolved around three key points:
1. 8K encoding/decoding + 6 TOPS NPU single-chip integration, breaking through the cost of “display + AI”;
2. Industrial-grade supply from -20°C to 80°C, allowing government and enterprise clients to confidently include “sustainability” in their bids;
3. Four software moats—OpenHarmony, ROS, Yocto, RKNN—allowing manufacturers to calculate project timelines from initiation to mass production in days.
Qualcomm, Amlogic, HiSilicon, Ascend, and Horizon Robotics still guard their territories, but RK3588 has captured 18 “firsts” and over 20 “seconds” across sixty tracks in just three years, shattering the stereotype that “domestic products can only do low-end.” The next round of battles is already aimed at the 6 nm RK3688 and the 32 TOPS RK3588M upgraded version. The story is far from over, but the power rankings of domestic chips have been completely rewritten due to RK3588’s sixty urban battles.