The Cubieboard is a development board for the AllWinner A10 Cortex A8 processor. Contrary to some other AllWinner A10 “development board” that are simply based on a tablet or mini PC PCB, the cubieboard has been designed specifically as a development platform and provides access to I/O pins.

Here are the specs of this development board:

SoC – AllWinner A10 1GHz ARM cortex-A8 processor with Mali400 GPU

System RAM – 1GB DDR3 @400MHz

Storage – 2 MMC slot

Video Output – HDMI 1080p

Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet

USB – 2 USB Host, 1 USB OTG

1 IR sensor

96 expansion pins including i2c, spi, lvds, sata…

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can be supported via external USB dongle(s). The prototype above is the first revision of the hardware, and final hardware may look different. Some connectors (e.g. SATA) are not soldered in the picture above.

The cubieboard is expected to be an open-hardware board, and if that’s the case, the schematics, PCB layout, gerber and mechanical files will be available publicly. As with other AllWinner A10 hardware, Android 4.0.4 and several Linux distribution will be supported such as Ubuntu 12.04 desktop.

The board is still being developed, but the first beta boards should be available early September for $49 US + shipping, possibly sold to developers only (TBC).

You can find some more information on sunxi-linux.org website, as well as cubieboard.org which is still under construction, and even though there’s a “Buy Now” button, you can’t buy just yet.

[Update: You can now buy the 512M prototype for $45 + shipping on Aliexpress]