ARM Cortex A15/A17 SoCs Comparison – Nvidia Tegra K1 vs Samsung Exynos 5422 vs Rockchip RK3288 vs AllWinner A80

We’re now starting to get quite a few players with ARM Cortex A15 cores on the market, as well as some with ARM Cortex A17. So a comparison table of different quad and octa SoCs might be a useful thing to do. I’ve put aside SoCs such as HiSilicon K3V3, and OMAP5, and focused on the four latest processors: Nvidia Tegra K1 (32-bit), Samsung Exynos 5422, Rockchip RK3288 and AllWinner A80. I haven’t included Mediatek MT6595 and Qualcomm SnapDragon 805, because the two companies mainly focus on smartphones and tablets (although it appears to be slowly changing for Qualcomm), documentation is usually difficult or impossible to find, and in the case of Qualcomm they use their own ARMv7 Krait cores. I’ve highlighted some features in green, in case a particular SoC appears to have an edge. Rockchip RK3288 AllWinner A80 Nvidia Tegra K1 Samsung Exynos 5422 CPU 4x ARM Cortex-A17 […]

VidOn.me Updates XBMC Source Code for their AllWinner A20 and A31 based Android Media Players

Just at the end of last year, VidOn.me released XBMC apks for their AV100 and AV200 media players, respectively powered by AllWinner A20 and AllWinner A31 SoCs. The company already had an XBMC repository on github, but at the time it hadn’t been updated for a year. Things have changed since then, as they’ve committed several changes, some of them related to AllWinner SoCs to their XBMC repository. I haven’t look into details, but it could be VidOn.me is now in compliance with the GPLv2 license which XBMC is licensed under. If the code is complete, another “side effect” could be there’s finally support for AllWinner A20 (and A10) for XBMC Android. Previsouly, some people tried the AV100 APK on other AllWinner A10/A20 devices, but it did not work, most probably because they locked the binary to their devices, something that would be more difficult to do if the code […]

PcDuino8 Board Will be Powered by AllWinner A80 SoC

Many have been waiting for A80 OptimusBoard development board powered by AllWinner A80 octa-core big.LITTLE SoC to come to market. It could be another board will be targeting the DIY crowd, as LinkSprite and AllWinner have announced a strategic partnership to work on PcDuino8 board also based on the upcoming eight core SoC. The board picture above appears to be exactly the same as PcDuino3 with AllWinner A20, except they’ve replaced it with A80. This is really odd by itself, and since AllWinner A80 does not support SATA, an extra USB to SATA IC would be required. The lack of USB3 port is also surprising. So I’m assuming the board above is simply a photo edited in Photoshop. We could then further assume the board is not ready, and they are simply waiting for the PCB, which will they debug in May, before shipping the board by the end of […]

AllWinner A80 To Support 5 Operating Systems, Products To Become Available in May

AllWinner has released some more materials about their AllWinner A80 Ultracore octa core big.LITTLE SoC ahead of the Hong Kong Electronics Fair 2014, and we’ve learned more about OptimusBoard, as well as tablets and TV boxes availability through a video interview shot by Charbax at the exhibition. Part of the release was more detailed specifications: CPU Octa-Core big.LITTLE Cortex-A15/7 Low-power CoolFlex power management architecture 2MB + 512 KB L2 Cache GPU – Imagination Technologies PowerVR 64-core G6230 with support for OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0, OpenCL 1.x, RenderScript, DX 9.3/10.0 Memory Supports dual-channel DDR3/DDR3L/LPDDR3/LPDDR2, up to 8GB Supports Raw NAND with 72-bit ECC Supports eMMC V4.5 Video Supports UHD H.264/VP8 4Kx2K@30fps video playback Supports multi-format FHD video decoding, including MPEG 1/2/4, H.263, H.264. WMV9/VC-1, etc Supports H.265/VP9 1080p@30fps video playback Supports H.264 HP/VP8 4Kx2K@30fps video capture Supports 3840×1080@30fps 3D decoding, BD/SBS/TAB/FP supported Supports 3840×1080@30fps 3D encoding Supports RTSP, HTTP, HLS, RTMP, MMS […]

Linaro Connect Asia 2014 Opening Keynote – Status and Future of ARMv8 Linux & Android [Video]

Linaro Connect Asia 2014 has just started in Macau today and will take place until Friday. You can follow the sessions live and/or their recordings via Linaro OnAir YouTube Channel. I’ve watched the opening keynote, and embedded the video at the bottom of this post. The keynote focuses on ARMv8 for Linux and Android on servers, mobile devices, digital home, and more, and involves two main speakers: George Grey, Linaro CEO , and Jon Masters, Chief ARM Architecture at Red Hat. The speaker beginning of the video provides some practical information and the schedule for Linaro Connect. The keynote itself really starts around 15:50 with George Grey who spends the first 10 minutes introducing the latest Linaro members: Qualcomm, Mediatek, ZTE, AllWinner and Comcast. He then talks about the new Mobile sub-committee (MOBSCOM) that will focus on big.LITTLE, Android optimization and Android on ARMv8, as well as the soon-to-be-announced Linaro […]

AllWinner UltraOcta A80 big.LITTLE SoC Officially Announced, Includes PowerVR G6230 GPU

Allwinner has formally announced AllWinner UltraOcta A80 SoC at Mobile World Congress 2014. The SoC featurs four Cortex A15 and four Cortex A7 cores in big.LITTLE configuration as well as Imagination Technologies PowerVR G6230 GPU, and a VPU with H.265 and VP9 support. The processor will be used in tablets, OTT media players, notebook PCs, all-in-ones, and smart TVs. Key Features: Ultra low power, high performance 28nm UltraOcta SoC with heterogeneous eight-core CPU computing Ultra performance graphics – PowerVR G6230 GPU with two shader clusters and 64 FP32 ALU cores CoolFlex power management system – optimized big.LITTLE technology to dynamically activate energy-efficient or high performance processor cores based on computing workload Next generation video engine – 4K encode/decode, H.265, VP9 Triple-screen display support Imagination PowerVR G6230 Rogue GPU is said to embed power saving technologies such as PVRTC and PVRTC2 texture compression formats, PVRIC (lossless image compression)  and PVRGC (lossless […]

AllWinner Linux-sunxi Community Presentation and Status Report – FOSDEM 2014

Oliver Schinagl, a member of linux-sunxi community working on open source kernel and bootloader for AllWinner SoCs, has given a presentation of the community at FOSDEM 2014 to give an overview, and show what progress has been made to date. I’ll write a summary in this post, but if you want to watch the video and/or access the slides scroll down at the bottom of the post. After explaining what sunxi is, and introducing himself, he gave some information about AllWinner and their SoCs: Founded in 2007 in Zhuhai, Chiang now with 550 employees including 450+ engineers 15% market share in 2013 for tablet SoCs, only behind Apple. Products: F-series SoC (2010), A10 (2011), A13, A10s (2012), and A20 (2013). (cnsoft He skipped A31(s) and A80 here as they are not really supported by the community). They list “Open Source Source” and “GPLv3” in their marketing materials although they clearly […]

How to Build and Run Tizen 2.0 on AllWinner Boards – FOSDEM 2014

Leon Anavi has spent some time building and running Tizen for Olimex A10s-OLinuXino-MICRO board based onAllWinner A10s cortex A8 processor, and gave a short presentation at FOSDEM 2014 showing the main steps involved in the project. The final result is basically a non-portable Tizen tablet with a main board connected to an LCD display. If you have an LCD screen, you could also use a monitor (VGA/HDMI) instead. After a short description of the hardware, and explaining it should also work on other AllWinner platforms such as Cubieboard, Leon gave a few no-nonsense recommendations he learned from his mistakes: Get a USB serial board for debugging Use recommended accessories from the manufacturer such as power supply or LCD display to make development easier Buy a board that can boot from micro SD or SD card, again for ease of development If something does not work… Restart the board! 🙂 In […]

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