The low end of the TV box market is now highly competitive with Rockchip and Amlogic battling to offer the cheapest solutions available, as we’ve seen in a recent factory price list of TV boxes with RK3229 based devices selling for as low as $17.8, and Amlogic S905W based boxes going for $17.5 and up (per unit) for orders of 200 pieces. Amlogic has been working on an even lower cost SoC with Amlogic S805X based on four Cortex A53 cores, the same Mali-450MP GPU, but no 4K support, and instead H.264, H.265 and VP9 video decoding up to 1080p60, as I found out in a document shared on Amlogic Open Linux website.
Amlogic S805X will be quite similar to Amlogic S905X and S905D with the same CPU by clocked at a lower 1.2 GHz frequency, the same penta-core GPU, TrustZone support, and Fast Ethernet. The main difference is that in order to lower costs, they limited the multimedia capabilities to 1080p video decoding, and 1080p video output. Those last two actually make it more similar to Amlogic S805 SoC, but instead of a four Cortex A5 32-bit cores, S805X comes with more powerful Cortex A53 64-bit cores, and VP9 support was added to S805X.
The processor is likely be used in both Android and Linux TV boxes, as the company’s Mbox P241 reference platform / development board based on S805X SoC, comes with either 512MB DDR3 or 1GB DDR4, coupled with eMMC flash, and an AP6255 wireless module supporting 802.11 b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2.
I’ve yet to see any S805X TV boxes, even on Alibaba, but I’d expect them to sell retail for around $20 including shipping. The processor could also be an interesting choice for low cost development boards, competing against Allwinner H5 solutions.
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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Wrt ‘competing’ against H5 on different devices than TV boxes it would be interesting how limited the count of USB2 ports is and whether S805X supports ARMv8 AES crypto extensions or not (H5 does, S905X does, S905 for example does not). Not to mention H5’s Gigabit Ethernet capability.
Besides that some folks already test with H6 (nothing useful heard yet, am especially interested in performance of the single PCIe 2.x lane) so I would assume the area where such limited dev boards based on H5 or this S805X could survive is ‘below 15 bucks’ country?
It would be nice if Amlogic stopped trying to confuse their customers by putting random stuff in chips constantly carrying the same name except for a trailing letter. They probably don’t realize that a number of potential customers will skip this one just because they’ve been told that “S805 is years old and 32-bit only”.
Why would a TV box need gigabit ethernet? Even 4k content is < 100 Mbps.
@Jerry
Who is talking about Gigabit Ethernet and boring TV boxes?
Two TV boxes purchased with the 805 chip are almost unusable.
You should try with libreelec, it will change your opinion…
Yes LibreELEC Kodi Krypton fixes all problems. See the AMLogic Sub forum on their website.
Thanks.
Libre Computer AML-S805X-AC “La Frite” development board coming soon with Amlogic S805X processor. Few details for now, but I’d expect it to look like AML-S905X-CC “LePotato” board.
Amlogic seem to be just dividing the market with s805x and s905w they have to low end chips, with slightly different features?
Smaller. AC is not the same form factor as the CC.
From their web page
AML-S805X-AC (La Frite)
Coming to Kickstarter July 2018 with general availability in August 2018.
Amlogic S805X SoC
4 ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1.2GHz
Cryptography Extension
2G + 3P ARM Mali-450 @ 650MHz
OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0
OpenVG 1.1
Amlogic Video Engine 10
Decoders
VP9 P2 1080P60
H.265 MP10@L4.1 1080P60
H.264 HP@L4.2 1080P60
JPEG / MJPEG
Encoders
H.264 1080P30
JPEG
Up to 1GB DDR4 SDRAM
2 USB 2.0 Type A
100 Mb Fast Ethernet
HDMI 2.0
MicroUSB Power In
eMMC 5.x Interface
128Mb SPI NOR
IR Receiver
U-Boot Button
40 Pin Low Speed Header (PWM, I2C, SPI, GPIO)
Seems to be online now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/librecomputer/390161934?ref=399083&token=2af98f81
Not quite yet: “This project is not live”
I was told the campaign would start this past Tuesday, but for some reasons the launch was delayed a bit.
I hope Libre Computer also provides some information then. The ‘Better performance than Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ in GeekBench’ sentence on KS is somewhat interesting since I would assume the S805X then also has ARMv8 Crypto Extensions and most probably higher memory performance (DDR2 vs. DDR4). Since how should 4xA53 at 1.2GHz be faster compared to 4xA53 at 1.4GHz otherwise?
Now it’s live and the page starting at ‘Infrastructure’ really worth a read even if you’re not interested in Fries and stuff like that. 🙂