Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments on AMLogic to Unveil M805 & S805 Quad Core Cortex A5 SoCs with Mali-450 GPU

AMLogic to Unveil M805 & S805 Quad Core Cortex A5 SoCs with Mali-450 GPU

As we are still waiting for retail availability of Android TV boxes and mini PCs based on AMLogic S802 quad core processor, rumors have started to surface about another quad core processor by the company called S805 to be used in media players, and probably it’s equivalent M805 for tablets. M803 and M805 were already part of AMLogic roadmap and were said to feature quad core CPU and GPU. It turns out M805 and S805 will feature four ARM Cortex A5 cores @ 1.5 GHz combined with a quad core ARM Mali-450 GPU (Mali-450MP2 ?).

AMLogic_S805That means S805 will be cost down version of S802 with four cortex A5 cores instead of four Cortex A9r4 cores, and Mali-450MP2 instead of Mali-450MP6. The new processor will also support hardware decoded of H.265 @ 1080p, and embed a Gigabit Ethernet controller. If the features listed in the roadmap are still correct, we can also expect the following:

  • Dual channel DDR3/LPDDR3 up to 2GB
  • 64-bit SDRAM bandwidth
  • OS – Android 4.4 Kit Kat
  • BGA package, 28nm HPM.

That probably means no 4K support like in M802/S802. There should also be a M803 tablet version pin-to-pin compatible with M801/M802, and possibly the equivalent S803 for media players.

There’s currently a battle between H.265 (HEVC) and royalty-free VP9 codecs, and some online service may choose one over the other, although I believe they’ll most probably support both as is the case with VP8 and H.264 we all use today. So ideally an SoC should support both, and it will become more and more important to getting hardware with proper H.265 or/and VP9 hardware decoding to get a much better user experience for online video streaming: either not seeing that buffering spinning wheel so often, or/and moving to an higher resolution.

I don’t really see Gigabit Ethernet for a 1080p media player as a big advantage, since I don’t know any 1080p videos that will saturate the 100 Mbps bandwidth. For media centers and 4K videos that’s another story however, and Gigabit Ethernet will become a must.

Via AndroidPC.es and 1pad.cn

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16 Replies to “AMLogic to Unveil M805 & S805 Quad Core Cortex A5 SoCs with Mali-450 GPU”

  1. The advantage with Gigabit Ethernet is that you could now use this SoC for NAS (Network Attached Storage) too, or a combo NAS and media player as such convergence devices are becoming more popular.

    Several NAS from large manufactures today already feature HDMI output and app store with XBMC for them, but these NAS boxes are all Intel x86/x86-64 based. None of those combo NAS boxes with XBMC are ARM based.

    Reply

  4. @cnxsoft No you are almost right.

    A “digital media player” with harddrive is still just a media player, nothing more. So just because a media player has a hgarddrive does not make it a NAS.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_media_player

    A “media center” is something more, and usually either refers a HTPC, or it can refer to a “digital media player” with the an external receiver/amplifier and a television set, as them the whole setup can be called a “media center” or “entertainment center”, which may also include a game console.

    But when I say NAS I do not simply mean a “digital media player” with harddrive, as that is not a NAS. No what a NAS is a appliance with harddrive(s) and real CIFS/SMB/Samba/FTP/NFS/AFP serving capability, with minimum really being CIFS/SMB/Samba support today.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

    And when I say media player and NAS combo then it needs to either be a real NAS with media player capability, or a media player with real NAS (CIFS/SMB/Samba server) capabilities.

    Media player with harddrive that only have UPnP and HTTP server can not really be classified as a NAS.

    Reply

  5. nice, a weak CPU but more than enough for STB if all the videos formats are supported, specially with the hardware decoding of HEVC, I dvb s2 device will be perfect with such beauty

    Reply

  6. Two things strike me:

    1) a SoC with BGA? Is that common?
    2) a SoC with a nice marketing ID / logo, just like Intel and AMD have been doing for 20 years for their CPU’s (and alas are put as stickers on your laptop)

    Reply

  8. @m][sko
    Still no answer to my request. It’s safe to assume they just ignored my email.

    @Harley
    If you have a media player and a hard drive, it’s likely you could transform it into a simple NAS. But I agree by default it does not make it a NAS.

    @Sander
    1) You Raspberry Pi’s BCM2835 is BGA

    Reply

  9. I’s not samba/ftp that’s missing in my linux mele a1000 to be a NAS, is the double sata connection….. with a dual controller I could format 2 drives as btrfs data mirroring (RAID 1) and completely forget anything else.
    USB isn’t the same (and having 2 usb port used for HHDs and one for keyboard leaves nothing for external memmory/peripherals).

    Reply

  10. @cnxsoft
    Unlikely that you can convert many media players with hard drive to a NAS, unless you can root them and install Linux it is very uncommon that you can use them as a NAS that support serving CIFS/SMB/Samba to the local network.

    And even if they did they they still miss a GUI management interface for the NAS part.

    In fact a majority of media players with internal hard drives does not even have a Ethernet port or support WiFi network.

    Reply

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