Allwinner has announced that the first products featuring its new octa-core processors should arrive by the end of the second quarter of 2014. The Chinese chip maker also says its A80 Optimus Board developer platform should ship in May.

The Allwinner UltraOcta A80 features an 8-core CPU with 4 ARM Cortex-A15 cores and 4 lower-power Cortex-A7 cores. The chip uses ARM big.LITTLE technology and heterogenous computing so that you can use all 8 CPU cores at once when needed, while using a combination of fewer cores most of the time to conserve power.

Allwinner’s chip features PowerVR G6230 graphics with OpenGL ES 3.0 support and can handle H.264 and H.265 video decoding. The chip maker says it can power up to 3 displays at once and it can handle 1080p or 4K video.

The chip supports up to 8GB of RAM and features support for eMMC v4.5 flash storage.

While most Allwinner chips are used in Android or Linux tablets and TV boxes, the company is also positioning the Allwinner UltraOca A80 as a solution for notebooks, smart TVs, desktops, digital signage.

The A80 Optimus Board could also be an interesting alternative to a Raspberry Pi for folks looking for a more powerful single-board computer for development purposes… or for DIY system building.

The board is small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, and features Allwinner’s A80 CPU as well as USB, Ethernet, and other ports along with UART, GPIO, and JTAG connectors.

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