Allwinner A80 Octa-Core Hardware Coming Next Month

In June we should start seeing the Allwinner A80-based hardware designs hitting the market for a much needed performance boost for Allwinner SoCs.

The Allwinner A80 is the company's first Cortex-A15-based SoC design and it's in a big.LITTLE configuration to sport eight processor cores in the form of four Cortex-A15 cores and four Cortex-A7 cores. The A80 Octa should be mightly powerful compared to the Chinese company's well-known A1x/A2x line-up with Cortex-A8 and A7 chips that power many of the cheap foreign tablets on the market. Making the Allwinner A80 more appealing too is that its graphics are upgraded to the PowerVR G6230. While there's been many Cortex-A15 and big.LITTLE SoCs already out there, the A80 should be coming in at a low price point and drive up the performance for next-gen, low-end devices.

Availability on A80-powered hardware has been quiet but there's been announcements recently concerning a PcDuino 8 ARM development board, but Allwinner has been quiet on specifics. We have now heard from Allwinner that the PcDuino 8 and CubieBoard 8 powered by this new high-end Chinese SoC, will be shipping in June. Confirmation was provided to us via Twitter. Hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on some of the A80-based products for ARM Linux benchmarking at Phoronix.