Yesterday, Olimex showed their new A20-OLinuXino board. This AllWinner A20 board is still a prototype, and there are currently 3 of them only, but the good news is that it appears to be working, 50 developer edition boards will be manufactured shortly, and mass production should start in June.
AllWinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 can clearly be seen in the middle of the board, but if you look close to the top left, you’ll see a marking: “A10-OLINUXINO-MICRO”. That’s because, as planned, they managed to design one PCB for both AllWinner A10 and A20 processors, and they’ll sell both versions.
Olimex A10/A20-Olinuxino boards have the followings specifications:
- SoC – AllWinner A10 Cortex A8 processor or AllWinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 processor, both running @1Ghz
- System Memory – 512MB or 1GB DDR3 memory depending on model
- Storage – 4GB NAND Flash (optional), 2x microSD card slot, and SATA connector
- Video Output – HDMI, VGA, LCD connector to connect A13-LCDxxx with 4.3″ 480×272 pixels, 7″ 800×480 pixels and 10.1″ 1024×600 pixels with touch screens
- Audio In and out
- USB – 2x USB 2.0 hosts, 1x USB-OTG
- Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet
- I/O – 160 GPIOs on 0.1″ connectors
- Power – Power management IC with Lipo battery support, allow stand alone work and USB host working on LiPo battery power supply. 6-16 V DC input power supply can work with any power supply adapter and automotive power 12V
- Misc – 9 user buttons with Android functions
Please note even though AllWinner A20 does support 1Gbe Ethernet, but A20-OlinuXino boards apparently do not, so if it is important for you application, you may want to wait for Cubieboard II, which will come with Gigabit Ethernet support. On the other hand, A10/A20-OlinuXino is open hardware (current Schematics and gerber files are available), and Cubieboard (II) is not fully open hardware.
Both AllWinner A10 and A20 boards have been found to work with Android 4.2.2 (part of AllWinner SDK) as you can see below.
They also posted the boot log for A20-OLinuXino. Please note that AllWinner A20 can only run Android for now, because AllWinner only provides an Android SDK, but Olimex will soon start to work with the community to port Linux to the A20-OlinuXino boards.
The 50 A20-OlinuXino boards should be ready within one or two weeks, and include 1GB RAM, 4GB NAND Flash. A20-OlinuXino will be sold for 65 Euros, and a future version without Flash will be sold for 55 Euros.
Finally, Olimex also announced they’ve started to work on a low cost A20 SoM (System-on-module) that will sell for 25 to 30 Euros, and comes with A20, DDR3 memory, and power IC only, so that you can build your own hardware and simply insert this module on your baseboard. There’s no mention of the standard (e.g. SO-DIMM, SMARC, EDM…), if any, they’ll use for the module.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
According to some people A20 software support is terrible and even Olimex says they aren’t bothering with Linux so this is only an Android board 🙁
kinda sucks, eh?
@hippie
For now it’s only Android, but as I mentioned they’ll work on it. Now not many people about A20 hardware so progress is slow. But up to 50 cubieboard ii (AllWinner A20) boards will be sent to developers, so you can expect proper Linux support in a couple of months.
@cnxsoft I’ll wait for cubies (maybe). They promissed a 2GB board.
@cnxsoft
actually running Linux on A20 is not so hard, Dimitar Gamishev almost complete the bootable Linux image on our board, so by the end of the week we may have full featured Linux running on our A20-OLinuXino-MICRO developer’s edition boards
hippie :
If you’re looking for Linux support you’re much better off with an I.MX6 board.
@bombai
Really? Allwinner isn’t directly supporting open source software, but we do have all the code we need for it to be GPL compliant. Thanks to tom cube from the cubieboard, we even have known good framebuffer/X11 OpenGLES2/EGL binaries. There is a big and active open source community at linux-sunxi.org, i really rather doubt that Marvell can match that atm.
That would of course be freescale.
@Luc Verhaegen
I agree that Tom Cubie and the user community is placing an effort on Linux support, but other makers like Olimex are more worried on releasing board after board with little or no support.
Good job with the Lima driver too.
@bombai Olimex has worked pretty hard to get GPL sources released from AllWinner with some success. If you dig around a bit more on various sources such as the Linux arm-netbook mailing list I suspect you will find that your statement is incorrect.