Previously Allwinner only had A-Series processor such as A10 that were used in tablets and media players, but they’ve recently launch H-series processors for “Home entertainment” such as H64, H8 or H3 SoCs that have been specifically designed for media players and OTT (Over-the-top) boxes. The company has unveiled its OTT SoC roadmap at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair which adds two new processors Allwinner H2 and Allwinner H5.
Allwinner H2+ will a quad core Cortex A7 processor support H.265 video decoding, 1080p decoding, and TrustZone support, and should the cheapest processor of the family. Based on the chart above, the processor must have been sampling by the end of last year, so H2+ media players should come to market very soon.
Allwinner H5 will be at the other end of the scale, featuring eight Cortex A53 cores, a 4K H.265 decoder, an H.265 encoder (1080p?), and TrustZone support as all their other recent processors. The processor is expected in Q2 2015 (That’s now), so I assume products will hit the shelves by the end of the year.
NetbookItalia also filmed a few products with Allwinner H8 and H3 processors, as well as a largish Allwinner H64 development board for OTT box (not Nobel64) that will run Android 5.0 on top of Linux 3.10.
Via AndroidPC.es
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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finally some Post Processing for Android Devices, the Display Engine looks promising
natsu, real issue is no hw decoding supported under Linux 🙁 lib cedarX is still too much closed and they are not willing to share any details to help devs to enable hw decoding and acelleration of audio/video under linux
@kusta
the last release of CedarX a month ago was “partially” open source I think, but is not enough, one thing though, the CedarX engine is really good with an excellent video playback, my Onda V989 with A80T can play H.264 @ 180 Mbps without breaking a sweat, I hear that some folks have done some successful reverse engineering on the binary of cedarX and it worked just fine with archlinux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ5yQqwpOJU
@natsu
The status of the reverse-engineered open source driver is available @ http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX/Reverse_Engineering
The page has not been updated since early 2014, not sure if there is progress.
Allwinner wants to expands its OTT business so I’m confident video support will improve, just because their customers will require it. Improvements may not mean open source, but at least better working video libraries in Linux.
pricing?
Pictures of first H5 devices appeared and now ‘quad core’ is written on the chip: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1762-opi-3-and-opi-pc2-with-h5/
Specs indeed changed. Allwinner said:
So it looks like H5 is the new H64 on their roadmap.
@cnxsoft
Thanks for forwarding the answer. Well, I wouldn’t call something ‘specs’ that’s non-existent 😉 — H5 is not even mentioned on Allwinner’s pages at all.
H64 came with PMIC support (Jide’s Remix Mini uses AXP803) while H5 does obviously not. And I’m still wondering whether the 3 USB host ports that can be seen on the new Orange Pis come from an USB hub or directly from the SoC (then H5 would be the first cheap A53 SoC with IO bandwith that doesn’t suck)
@tkaiser
I meant the basic specifications like the core type, number of cores, etc…
Allwinner H5 page will be up this week, and I’ve been told I’ll get the product brief soon.
Is it possible to get all comments from a given thread by email without posting?
@Henrique
Now you can. I’ve just changed the plugin. You should now see the text:
H5 is confirmed to have 3 real USB ports but more importantly R40 (with SATA!) is officially announced as ‘A20 Upgrade Edition: Dual-core upgrade to Quad-core(CPU), 55nm upgrade to 40nm(Craft), lower power consumption, smaller package’: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1762-opi-3-and-opi-pc2-with-h5/?view=getlastpost