A10-OLinuXino first prototypes are assembling

A10-OLinuXino routing took 3 months but this is really monster board and instead in 6 layers as per Allwinner recommendations we routed it at 4, so we now will have to see if it will work at all as it doesn’t quite blindly following the official Allwinner routing 🙂

Another experiment we are going to do it to see if A10 can work with 2GB RAM memory. We asked Allwinner if this is possible and the response was: yes it may be possible but we never try it as our market is low cost tablets and when the memory rise to 2GB the price is not low cost.

At Electronica we spoke to lot of memory suppliers, Memphis is partner we work for a long time and they offered us 4Gbit DDR3 memories to try to our boards.

If we succeed this will be the first A10 board with 2GB RAM.

I asked Henrik Nordstrom what he think about this and his reply was:

From a DRAM controller perspective it do look like it should work, both in single and dual rank configurations. Configuration of the DRAM controller is very flexible, and physical address space have 2GB DRAM at 0x4000000-0xC0000000.

A bit unsure about the virtual address space used by the Linux kernel.
There DRAM normally starts at 0x80000000 and there is I/O and other things in the upper 512MB region not leaving room for a full 2GB DRAM. But this is most likely only a configuratoin issue.

So next week we will have quite interesting time hacking A10.