At the end of last month I wrote about 96Boards TV Platform specifications, and noticed Hisilicon had one such boards, but details were sparse. Linaro has now officially unveiled HiSilicon Poplar board, the first 96Boards TV Platform board, sold for $79 + shipping on Aliexpress.
Poplar board specifications:
- SoC – HiSilicon Hi3798C V200 quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 CPU up to 2.0 GHz per core with ARM Mali-T720 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.1/3.0/2.0/1.1/1.0, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.2/1.1 Full Profile, RenderScript, and Microsoft DirectX 11 FL9_3
- Memory – 1 or 2 GB DDR3 (Specs are conflicting depending where you look)
- Storage – 8GB eMMC flash + micro SD card slot
- Video Output – HDMI 2.0a with HDCP 2.2 up to 4K @ 60Hz
- Video Decoding – H.265/HEVC Main/Main10 and VP9 up to 4K @ 60 fps
- Audio Output – HDMI, optical S/PDIF, 3.5mm audio jack
- Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n/ac WiFi and Bluetooth
- USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 2xUSB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG port for console
- Expansion
- 40-pin Low Speed (LS) connector with UART, SPI, I2S, 2x I2C, 12x GPIO
- 1x PCIe 2.0 interface
- 12-pin Smart Card connector (unpopulated)
- 24-pin connector for tuner (unpopulated)
- Debugging – 1x JTAG port, 1x UART connector
- Misc – IR receiver, boot selection jumper, LEDs, power button
- Security – ARM Trustzone, trusted execution environment, secure boot, secure storage, secure video path, DRM, DCAS
- Power Supply – 12V / 2A
- Dimensions – 160 x 120 mm (96Boards TV platform specs)
- Temperature Range – 0°C to +70°C
Hisilicon Hi3798C V200 is quite an interesting processor with many high speed and media interfaces, and while they used most of them, they did not leverage support for SATA. Luckily, there’s still USB 3.0 and PCIe if you need faster storage.
The board is sold with Android 5.1.1, but it will be the main development platform of Linaro Digital Home Group which aims “to continue creating optimized, high-performance secure media solutions for ARM on both Linux- and Android-based platforms. Licensees of the RDK (Linux) will be able to create Open Embedded/Yocto RDK builds for Poplar. The Poplar board will also serve as a common development platform for Android TV (AOSP) as well as for TVOS-based STB solutions used in China.”
In the meantime, you may find some information on Tocoding Poplar page, or access directly the hardware user manual. Eventually, 96Boards Poplar page will be a good place to look.
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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