A80s Octa Core Allwinner SOCs – they finally arrived!

Allwinner surprised us nicely while we have been at Linux Con they sent us 10 samples of their super duper new A80 Octa core processor.

I hate when Marketing in some companies start mixing dreams with realities and announce chips while they even are not in the pipeline 🙂

Allwinner announced this chip in February, then promised samples to be shipped in May, June, August, September, well they finally sent 10 in October 🙂

The reason we still do not see mass production of devices with A80 can be guess after reading CNX-Software blog . The firmware performance is still far away from stable and exploiting all features this chip can offer.

From Allwinner were kind enough to send some samples to Linux-Sunxi community.

We are almost complete with our A80 design so soon we will have more update.

First A80 tablet is now on sale for $177

Nicolas from ARMdevices.net made interesting video about the new tablets with A80 from Allwinner headquarter.

Although officially Allwinner have no “information” about A80 – no datasheet, no pricing etc. It seem they worked silently to release tablet reference design which is ready for production now.

Interesting feature is hardware face recognition in A80 which allow tablet to track your face and if you set it with this feature your video player can stop when you look outside tablet and continue to play when you look back at the tablet screen.

The sell price $177 gives rough idea that the release price of A80 would be about same as the price of A31 when it was first released several months ago, the severe competition keep the price of this Octa core processor reasonable.

A80-OLinuXino OSHW 8-core Linux computer development begins

Allwinner is about to release soon (end of this month hopefully) datasheet and info about their new 8-core monster processor with 4x Cortex-A15 + 4x Cortex-A7 and here we go and start preparing what to include in the new A80-OLinuXino.

We would love to hear your feedback and recommendation what do you think is important as value and “to have” on board, here are the major features (taken from Allwinner site) :

• DDR3  standard 2GB, optional 4GB
• Gigabit Ethernet
• optional NAND Flash 4GB
• SD cards x4 possible
• USB-OTG 3.0
• USB hosts x2 2.0
• MIPI camera interface
• real ADCs x2
• PWM
• UART x7
• I2C x7
• SPI x4
• I2S
• LCD

Unfortunately A80 have no audio on chip so external codec is necessary if you want to have Audio connector how important is this if we already have audio on the HDMI connector?

If we go in to LIME form factor route we have to look just for the bare minimum of connectors due to the space limitation, if we go in max features direction the board will become big and expensive.

Let’s the wishes begin 🙂

More specs disclosed for the new A80 octa-core processor from Allwinner

Today we got update on A80 specs:

• Octa-Core big.LITTLE CortexTM-A15/7
• Low-power CoolFlexTM power management architecture
• PowerVR 64-core G6230
• OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0, OpenCL 1.x, DX 9_3
• dual-channel DDR3/DDR3L/LPDDR3/LPDDR2, up to 8GB
• Raw NAND with 72-bit ECC
• eMMC V4.5
• UHD H.264/VP8 4Kx2K@30fps video playback
• multi-format FHD video decoding, including MPEG 1/2/4, H.263, H.264. WMV9/VC-1, etc
• H.265/VP9 1080p@30fps video playback
• H.264 HP/VP8 4Kx2K@30fps video capture
• 3840×1080@30fps 3D decoding, BD/SBS/TAB/FP supported
• 3840×1080@30fps 3D encoding
• RTSP, HTTP, HLS, RTMP, MMS streaming media protocols
• dual-channel LVDS 1920×1080@60fps
• RGB LCD 2048×1536@60fps
• 4-lane MIPI DSI 1920×1200@60fps
• 4-lane eDP 2560×1600@60fps
• HDMI 1.4
• Integrated parallel and MIPI I/F sensor
• 5M/8M/12M/16M CMOS sensor
• 8/10/12-bit YUV/Bayer sensor
• 2x USB Host, USB 3.0/2.0 Dual-Role (host/device)
• Ethernet MAC
• 4x SPI, 7x TWI, 7x UART
• 4x SD/MMC
• HSIC
• PCM/I2S

A80 production is planned for June, now Allwinner works on the reference design.

A80 Octa core BigLittle SoC from Allwinner will be ready in 2014

Eva Wu from Allwinner marketing sent me the new logo for A80.

There is no much info about it yet, but it will be 8 core (4xCortex-A15 and 4xCortexA7) and Allwinner is working now on it. Probably it will have 8-16 GPU co-processors too, we hope these to be MALI but there are great chances these to be PowerVR like A31, Eva is silent on this.

This new 8-core SoC will position Allwinner again on top of Rockchip which work on Cortex-A12 and have now RK3188 which is the most productive Chinese SoC with 4-core Cortex-A9.

It’s great to see how these two companies penetrate in such fields where the Western companies dominated just few years ago and now are in the league where the big boys Samsung. Mediatek, Qualcomm etc are playing.

With 8-core the small linux computers will become desktop productivity. Let’s hope Allwinner will keep the SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI like in A20.