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Allwinner A23 "Sun8i" Support Gets Cleaned Up For The Linux Kernel

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  • Allwinner A23 "Sun8i" Support Gets Cleaned Up For The Linux Kernel

    Phoronix: Allwinner A23 "Sun8i" Support Gets Cleaned Up For The Linux Kernel

    Developers have put out their latest batch of Allwinner patches that allow for basic upstream kernel support of Allwinner's A23 SoC...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    They haven't 'switched', but rather it's a improved and stripped down version of the A20.

    It has some improvements that they added in the A31.

    Allwinner basically has two chip 'lines' now, the high-end, powerVR bits, and the budget mali bits.

    Btw, the A23 is absolutly an interesting SoC. While it lacks some neat features for embedded devices like sata or ethernet. Olimex did an interesting bit a while ago
    A23 is Dual Core Cortex-A7 in TQFP package, it’s like A13 vs A10 – reduced IOs and cut functionality for lower cost. A23 info leak for the first time this year at IFA expo in Berlin, wh…


    I hope they release some HDMI sticks with a23's, should be nice and powerfull

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    • #3
      Originally posted by oliver View Post
      They haven't 'switched', but rather it's a improved and stripped down version of the A20.

      It has some improvements that they added in the A31.

      Allwinner basically has two chip 'lines' now, the high-end, powerVR bits, and the budget mali bits.

      Btw, the A23 is absolutly an interesting SoC. While it lacks some neat features for embedded devices like sata or ethernet. Olimex did an interesting bit a while ago
      A23 is Dual Core Cortex-A7 in TQFP package, it’s like A13 vs A10 – reduced IOs and cut functionality for lower cost. A23 info leak for the first time this year at IFA expo in Berlin, wh…


      I hope they release some HDMI sticks with a23's, should be nice and powerfull
      Obviously it's not impressive if Michael says so. Impressive ARM stuff has 8 cores now, 4+ GB of RAM, 4k video, hundreds of gigabytes of eMMC, USB3, and so on. If not, it's boring uninteresting legacy crap.

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      • #4
        I have here a A20 soc ( Cubietruck ) are there improvements comming to A20 soc too? I mean I dont care to much about 2d or 3d desktop but more about cedarX good the A23 seems to not have the CedarX chip included, but the A31 has also CedarX chip included.

        Would love to be able to use xbmc on it ^^.

        I can watch I think even 1080p mkvs but 720p shure with smplayer but not with xbmc, dont really get why xbmc is always 1 year behind mplayer suppport till it gets supported.

        Or maybe we would need gtk or some other programm that has more or less the same features than xbmc has without the it seems problematic opengl rendering. so that arm socs dont all ave to wait years to be able to get used as mediacenter.

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        • #5
          AXP20x seems to be mainlined in 3.16?!

          On side note, AXP20x (smart power manager IC: charger + bunch of regulators) driver appears to finally land mainline in 3.16. Needless to say, without AXP 20x support, reclocking support for allwinners is fairly incomplete, since lower frequency is okay to run with lower voltage, reducing power usage further. But higher frequencies require greater voltages as well to operate correctly. This means proper scaling only possible if you can both change clocks and instruct power manager to change voltage at same time. This change is likely to make running allwinners with mainline kernel more pleasant thing than it was before.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by caligula View Post
            Obviously it's not impressive if Michael says so. Impressive ARM stuff has 8 cores now, 4+ GB of RAM, 4k video, hundreds of gigabytes of eMMC, USB3, and so on. If not, it's boring uninteresting legacy crap.
            Allwinner stuff costs about $50-60 only. And it also haves SATA on board in A10/A20 ICs and maybe somewhere else. Some also A20 boards come with "proper" gigabit Ethernet (real one, not some laggy-buggy-shit sitting on USB bus!). Making it interesting for little networked devices with HDD attached. It also boots from SD card and uses relatively simple and non-locked boot loader, making boot process rather straightforward and fully supported by opensource boot loader (u-boot).

            So while allwinner stuff is not best of the best, its "good enough" for many tasks one can find for small devices and haves attractive price, only beaten by Raspberry Pi in this regard (which is cheaper but offers much weaker hardware as well). And in fact allwinner's set of peripheral interfaces is quite good. And if I would need just a fast number cruncher, $100 graphic card from AMD would pwn 'em all as high-speed number cruncher. But would suck at I/O interfaces though. And most 8-core super-duper ICs do not have native gigabit or sata. So you have 8 cores but then you suck anyway since there is no decent I/O.
            Last edited by 0xBADCODE; 18 June 2014, 12:24 AM.

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