With their latest A33 SoC, Allwinner may have put a nail in the coffin of dual core application processor for tablets, as Eva Wu, AllWinner’s Marketing Manager, has just released some pricing info, and AllWinner A33 with AXP223 PMIC (Power Management Integrated Circuit) reference price is only $4.99, paving the way for ultra cheap quad core Android tablets.
I’ve also been given some estimates for (factory) prices for different tablet’s types powered by AllWinner A33:
- About $40 for 7″ tablets (800×480) with 1GB DDR3, and 8GB Flash.
- About $45 for 7.85″ tablets (1024×768) with 1GB DDR3, and 8GB Flash.
- About $50 for 8″ tablets (1280×800) with 1GB DDR3, 8GB Flash.
With four ARM Cortex A7 cores, a Mali-400MP2 GPU, and limited display resolutions, you won’t get an amazing user experience, but for a first tablet, or a kid’s tablet, it looks pretty good value. I estimate that Chinese stores may sell them for around $65 to $80 including shipping. AllWinner A33 SoC production will start in early July, so the first tablets based on this SoC should also start to become available in July.
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.
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i dont trust allwinner they will not spport any firmware updates
I won’t get suckered again into buying an ultra cheap tablet. *Knockonwood*
@Someone from the other side
I bought one once (Wondermedia Cortex A9), and it was not too bad. Unfortunately the 2,000 (or so) mAh battery died after nine months to one year…
@adem
It’s not necessarily AllWinner the problem, and it can be the guys who made the product that don’t update their firmware.
@adem
But now Alwinner is part of Linaro (http://www.linaro.org/members/), which gives some hope. Sooner or later all producers to be competitive will come to Linaro.
@cnxsoft
I have a no name RK3066 here. Atrociously bad screen, lousy performance with tons of lag and the HDMI out seemingly does not work at all (in fairness, I had fairly limited success with the Slimport on my Nexus, too). At least it has prevented me to go mess with noname MTK phones, so far.
Well I’ve just seem Intel Atom tablets using the newer SOCs that have open source graphics. Assuming you can get UEFI to boot your kernel these should be as open source as you can get.
The price isn’t too bad either.
That’s my hope, too, but unfortunately, so far I have not seen any with real Bay Trails (instead of Merrifield crap with PowerVR) from respectable manufacturers at sane prices…
@Alex
i hope so i still keep my cs868 just incase i see a good working firmware
@Alex
@adem
AllWinner is not a full member (I think just a “Group member”), so they won’t have a “Landing Team” that works directly on the hardware. I’m not sure what a “Group member” does / gets but I know it’s limited.
Even if AllWinner released a new AllWinner A31 SDK, there will not be a firmware upgrade for CS868, and whichever company did this product, moved on to something else.
@cnxsoft
If I’m not wrong, allwinner (or group of people) started to have some source code in mainline
https://www.kernel.org/doc/readme/Documentation-arm-sunxi-README
Slooowly, but we are going there
@Alex
Yes, correct but not related to Linaro I believe, but it’s work by linux-sunxi community
People can follow progress @ http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status
I also try to mention the main AllWinner – and ARM in general – changes in my “LInux x.xx Released” posts such as http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/06/11/linux-3-15-released/
@cnxsoft
After announcement from Cubie that new A80 dev board will be presented by their team, I hope that Linaro + Sunxi will help a bit with our problem.
Actually I still do not understand what linaro was created for … They build new kernel specifically for their devices and AOSP?
@Alex My hope is that by joining Linaro Allwinner will learn the standard practices for working on the Linux kernel and stop doing things their own way. Top of the list is to get rid of FEX and use the standard Device Tree. Second on the list is to start getting their code checked into mainline where it can be reviewed. Third is fix all of their other deviations from standard Linux in their various device drivers.
Linaro should also teach them a lot about openness and its advantages. For example, where is the latest version of their code and manuals? Who knows? there is no place to go get an official version of anything. What is the pipe line for getting security fixes out of Allwinner?
This is the difference between a Tier 1 vendor and the rest of the pack.
@Alex
Before company A was developing the Linux kernel for their ARM SoC behind closed doors, released a vendor tree, and eventually some bits may have made it to mainline, Company B, C ,D etc… did the same thing.
They realized kernel development, albeit critical, does not add value compared to their competitors, so Linaro allowed to bring all companies together to share more kernel work, saving on development cost, reduce time to market, and so on. So instead of having several engineering team working in their little corner, so all collaborate together. Of course, there are some differences between SoCs, so there are also team dedicated to specific SoCs and member hardware (Landing Teams).
@cnxsoft There is another reason for Linaro. Without a common group like Linaro we will never get an ARM distribution. An ARM distribution is a very valuable thing. Image a single install image that works on hundreds of devices like we have on the x86. Building a single kernel build that can boot on dozens of different ARM SOCs is a major goal of Linaro. This is why device trees are so important. When that generic ARM kernel boots it needs to know what device drivers to load. It’s the device tree that specifies this. Allwinner can never be part of an ARM distribution until they are part of the common kernel.
Allwinner A50 is an update with support for up to 2G DRAM LPDDR3/4, MIPI CSI 12M camera, 1920×1200 LCD. Other interfaces are the same