Pipo Max M9 Android tablet ships with a quad-core Rockchip processor

Rockchip processors currently power a number of Android tablets and mini-computers.

To be sure, we’ve seen the brand under the hood of several different products over the past year or two, and so far it seem as if the company only offers dual-core units for real-world devices – a policy that is about to change.

Indeed, the Pipo Max M9 Android-powered tablet is going to be one of the first devices on the market equipped with Rockchip’s new quad-core processor. The chip – dubbed the RK3188 – is paired with a Mali 400 GPU. We don’t know a lot about the processor just yet, but the M9 tablet was recently benchmarked giving us an idea of how the silicon can be expected to perform.

The tablet racked up a score of 18,013 on the Antutu benchmark and 5039 in Quadrant. Liliputing confirms the above-mentioned performance places the tablet somewhere between the Google Nexus 4 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, at least in terms of horsepower. Of course, as with any benchmark result, it’s worth noting that some of the scores don’t necessarily reflect real world performance.

If you’re more interested in the tablet than benchmarks, well, the new device sounds sounds rather interesting. Specs? A 10-inch screen set at a resolution of 1280 x 800,  2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. The GPU runs at 533 MHz and the tablet has cameras on the front and rear. Other hardware features include integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an HDMI port, and a microSDHC card slot for storage expansion.

Pre-order data for the tablet indicates the street price will be somewhere in the area of $280-$300.