allwinner News - Page 9 of 22 - CNX Software

June 1, 2018September 10, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Allwinner T2 is a Rebranded Allwinner A20 Processor Operating in Industrial Temperature Range

Last month, Allwinner unveiled A40 and A60 industrial and military grade processors leveraging IP blocks from the old-but-popular Allwinner A20 dual core processor. This is good news for software support, as A40 and A60 should hopefully become supported in U-boot and the Linux kernel without too many efforts, as well as for companies or makers requiring wider temperature ranges in their products. However, those new processors were not pin-to-pin compatible with Allwinner A20, so a PCB redesign would be required. That’s where Allwinner T2 comes into play, as reported by Olimex, it is a rebranded Allwinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 processor with an industrial temperature range (-40 to +85 °C) that makes it suitable for automotive infotainment. I actually covered Allwinner T2 back in 2015, but at the time Allwinner did not mention anything about temperature range, and SATA support – found in A20 – was not shows in […]

May 6, 2018May 7, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 53 Comments

Allwinner Unveils A40i/A40pro and A60i/A60pro Industrial & Military Grade Processors

Allwinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 processor was/is one of the most popular Allwinner SoCs thanks to its low cost, the availability of interfaces such as SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, and multimedia support with H.264 encoding and decoding. The company has now introduced new processors that build upon A20, but working in industrial and military temperature ranges, and compliant with various standards (TBD). Allwinner A40i & A40pro The first two models are quad core Cortex A7 processors with A40i being the industrial version, and A40pro the military grade one. Both share most of the same specifications: CPU – 4x Arm Cortex A7 @ 1.2 GHz GPU – Mali-400 MP2 Memory I/F – DDR2/DDR3/LPDDR2/LPDDR3 up to 3GB RAM Storage I/F – 32-bit NAND, eMMC, SD card, SPI NOR flash, SPI NAND flash, 1x SATA Video Engine Decoder – Multi-format decoder up to 1080p60 Encoder – H.264 encoder up to 1080p45 […]

April 20, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Allwinner VR9 SoC is Specifically Designed for Extended/Virtual Reality Headsets

Virtual reality headsets have been powered by application processors designed for smartphones, tablets, or even TV boxes. For example last year, I reviewed a low cost VR headset good enough to watch 360 / VR videos, but not gaming that was based on Allwinner H8 TV box processor. But we’ve previously seen Allwinner was working on VR9 & VR10 processors specifically designed for virtual reality headsets with launches scheduled for Q4 2016 and Q2 2017. There’s obviously been some delays, but the company also now formally launched Allwinner VR9 quad core Cortex A53 processor specifically designed for XR and VR headset (Extended / Virtual reality). Allwinner VR9 key features & specifications with parts that look specific to XR/VR highlighted in bold: CPU – Quad-Core Arm CortexM-A53 @ 1.8GHz with 32KB L1 I-cache + 32KB L1 D-cache per core, 512KB L2 cache, CoolFlex power management architecture GPU – Arm Mali-T760 @ […]

March 30, 2018March 30, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Allwinner S3 Dual Camera SoC Includes 128MB RAM, an I2S Audio Interface

Allwinner V3s processor was introduced a little over a year ago with a single Arm Cortex A7 core, 64MB DRAM built-in, and designed for camera applications with parallel CSI and 4-lane MIPI CSI2 interfaces It looks like Allwinner has now launched an updated version with Allwinner S3, still based on Cortex A7, but increasing memory to 128MB, and adding some interfaces like I2S. We don’t have a whole lot of information, apart from a development board (SC1615S) on Taobao with the following (tentative) specifications: SoC – Allwinner / Sochip S3 Cortex-A7 processor with 128MB DDR3 Storage – 16MB NOR Flash, 4GB eMMC flash, SPI NAND flash, micro SD card Display I/F – LCD, LVDS, touch panel connectors, HDMI port Camera I/F – 1x 4-lane MIPI CSI, 1x parallel CSI Audio – HP, 2x MIC, speaker headers, PCM header Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth (AP6212 or XR819 […]

February 2, 2018June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 45 Comments

Bootlin Wants to Bring Allwinner VPU Support to Mainline Linux (Crowdfunding)

I wrote about Free Electrons several times in the past due to their work on porting Arm SoCs to mainline Linux. Free Electrons is no more. But don’t be sad, as it’s not because they closed shop, but instead they changed their name to Bootlin due to trademark trolls. Free Electrons Bootlin intensively worked on Allwinner processors, for example working with Next Things Co. to add CHIP board to mainline Linux, or more recently adding support for OpenGL ES in mainline Linux, albeit with closed-source user space binary blobs. The company normally work with partners for their work, but for their latest initiative aiming to bring Allwinner VPU (Video Processing Unit) to the official Linux kernel there’s asking funding from the community through a Kickstarter campaign. For those who do not know, the VPU is the IP block within the SoC used for hardware video decoding of codecs such as MPEG2, […]

January 4, 2018January 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

$129 Allwinner R18 based 3-Mic Far Field Amazon AVS Development Kit in the Works

Allwinner-SoC-Only-3-Mic-Far-Field-Dev-Kit-for-Amazon-AVS

Several companies are already offering development kits for Amazon AVS (Alexa Voice Service), but as we’ve seen in the past, those are rather expensive with far-field kits such starting at $349 with kits such as Synaptics AudioSmart 4-Mic Development Kit, or Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit, and hands-free kits being barely cheaper at $299 and up. But there will soon be a cheaper solution, as Allwinner and SinoVoIP (aka Banana Pi) are working on “SoC-Only 3-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit for Amazon AVS” that includes 3 microphones, and works without special DSP, relying instead on Allwinner R18 processor’s audio codec and capabilities. Allwinner SoC-Only 3-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit for Amazon AVS (aka R18-AVS-EVK) specifications: SoC – Allwinner R18 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.15GHz with Mali400MP2 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash Video Output – HDMI Audio – 6x Microphones, 2x AEC, AUX and headphone output; GMEMS voice […]

November 27, 2017March 17, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 57 Comments

Amlogic S905X vs Rockchip RK3328 vs Allwinner H6 Processors – Benchmarks & Features Comparison

Rockchip, Amlogic, and Allwinner are all battling for the lower and mid-range segments of the TV box market, so it may be interesting to compare their solutions. We won’t look into the ultra low-end market with 32-bit ARM Cortex A7 processor, but instead compare some of the recent quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 processor for 4K HDR TV box from the company with respectively Amlogic S905X, Rockchip RK3328, and Allwinner H6 SoCs. We’ll compare some of the benchmarks obtained with Android TV boxes, as well as other features like video support, USB, and Ethernet interfaces. S905X vs RK3328 vs H6 Benchmarks Let’s start with results for popular Android benchmarks: Antutu 6.x, Vellamo 3.x, and 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme v1.2 with results obtained from 3 TV boxes: Mini M8S II (Amlogic S905X), A95X R2 (Rockchip RK3328), and Zidoo H6 Pro (Allwinner H6). A score is highlighted in green is there’s a […]

November 15, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Allwinner H6 Datasheet and User Manual Released

Putting aside the ill-fated Allwinner A80 SoC, Allwinner H6 is the first Allwinner processor with multiple high speed interfaces such as Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 and PCIe, and also support 4K HDR with the company’s Smart Color Engine for video processing. So far, it’s been found in some 4K HDR TV boxes such as Zidoo H6 Pro or Beelink GS1. We’ve already known Shenzhen Xunlong was working on Orange Pi 3 Plus board with the processor for a few months, but Pine64 appear to have joined the party, and will soon launch Pine64 H64 board according to their Wiki. No photos yet, but the company released various documents for the board including Allwinner H6 V200 datasheet (80 pages), and Allwinner H6 V200 user manual (965 pages). The documents should – for instance – allow sunxi-linux community to port drivers for the processor. Some corrections have been made to the first […]