About the hardware:
We made two versions of the A10s prototypes – Rev.A with all components on top and Rev.B with decouplung capacitors on bottom near the BGA chip (both versions are on GitHub).
Then assembled both versions, none of Rev.A worked, so plasing the decouplung capcitors under the BGA is mandatory for the board to work correctly.
From Rev.B the boards work but not stabile, from time to time DDR memory crash and board freezes, this is because we decided that A10s is similar to A10 and the resistor matrixes on the DDR are not mandatory. What we see is that in Linux A10s have same processor ID as A13 which makes us to believe that A10s and A13 are same silicon die just with different ports wired to the different packages TQFP and BGA. The same unstability we see on A13 when try to remove these resistor matrixes, so in the new REV.C we have to keep them.
Another change we will do in Rev.C we are working on now is to add NAND flash on board, which will be optional i.e. we will offer boards with and without NAND assembled.
One bad feature of A10s with the BGA package is that it overheats significant when work at 1Ghz, same we see on the A10 MK802 dongle we have the processor IC overheats up to 60-70C so you cant touch it with finger even at ambient temperature.
A13 do not have such issues as it have big metal pad on bottom side which we connect to large GND ground plane so A13 never ever got temperature higher than the temperature it operates, this makes A13 much more suitable for industrial and automotive applications.
A10 and A10s overheat and we should think for proper heatsink which we to assembly on top of the BGA to dissipate this heat they generate.
As you can see from the picture we added heat sink to A10s as without it it freezes after some hours of work.
The new Rev.C will be ready by the end of February for more extensive testings, this will delay the planned mass production with few weeks.
About the software:
Android 4.0.4 image generated with A10S-SDK from Allwinner is working fine, but do not support Ethernet by default.
Angry Birds works well on HD screen:
You can see here in action Angry Birds on A10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD3IImqEprI
The Android video player is pretty good at HD playback http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB-eQeKXlTQ
for some reason XBMC on Android works worse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_579b3by1JA
Linux support patches are submitted to Linux-Sunxi so A10s software support have no issues.
, don’t worry it will be fixed in the production run, which is to follow. Also these prototypes were produced in Green color instead Red as they will be in production.
