MediaTek Announces An Interesting Deca-Core ARM Dev Board

The folks at MediaTek in Hsinchu announced the Helio X20 Development Board today as the first development board using a tri-cluster, deca-core design.

As implied by the name, this developer board is using the Helio X20 SoC, which features a tri-cluster CPU architecture and ten processing cores: two Cortex-A72 at 2.3GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores @ 2.0GHz, and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.4GHz. Depending upon system load, the relevant/needed cores will power up. The X20 uses ARM's Mali graphics, supports 2 x LPDDR3 POP memory, and has integrated 802.11ac WiFi.

If you are not familiar with the Helio X20 SoC and wish to learn more, visit Mediatek-Helio.com.

Back to this development board, it's compatible with Linaro's 96Boards specification, designed for IoT and other developer use cases, and supports Android 6.0. Sadly, no word on support for conventional GNU/Linux distributions. This X20 Development Board has 2GB of onboard memory and 8GB EMMC5.1 along with a micro-SD slot.

More details on the just-announced X20 development board can be found here. Initially the board is available in China/Asia though it looks like in the months ahead it will be coming to US and European markets.