by OLIMEX Ltd in Allwinner, ARM, linux, olinuxino, open source, OSHW Tags: a53, a64, board, Cortex, development, laptop, olinuxino

A64 was announced January this year by Allwinner. It’s a quad core 64 bit Cortex-A53 processor targeting tablets.

Some features are:

H.265/H.264 video decoding in hardware

HDMI 4K display support

DDR3L memory with lower consumption is supported

eMMC 5.0 support

Last week we got notice that Allwinner have already A64 in production and we will get some chips with the software SDK for Android 5.1 based on Linux Kernel 3.10 by the end of the month (yes they finally escaped from Kernel 3.4 🙂 ), so we started to work on our A64-OLinuXino.

This chip is with humble peripherials, as Allwinner target and announcement is to sell it for $5 in volume (obviously not for mortals as we have to buy the first chips at higher than this price).

LCD parallel RGB, LCD LVDS, MIPI and HDMI video output

Camera interface

One USB Host

One USB-OTG

Two SPI

Four I2C

Six UARTs

As you can see no Ethernet, no SATA, no PCIe, but this is what you get for $5 right ?

What we found is also that although being 64-bit ARM the A64 memory bus is just 32-bit wide, we guess to make BOM smaller.

This will hurt the performance, so we have to see how it will behave compared to A20 and H3 for instance.

A64-OLinuXino initial specs will be:

A64 4 core Cortex-A53

AXP803 PMU + Audio support

1GB or 2GB DDR RAM

4GB NAND Flash oe eMMC

micro SD card connector

micro USB-OTG

2Mpix Camera on board

USB-HOST

HDMI 4K output

Audio Output, Input

LCD connector to connect with all our LCD-OLinuXino 4.3″ 7.0″ 10.1″ 15.6″

RTL8723BS WiFi + BT4.0 on board for connectivity

GPIO connector with access to all processor resources

5V power input

This will be our first 64 bit ARM board and also the first OLinuXino we make completely with KiCAD.

If everything goes smoothly we will have first prototypes by end of November and depend on how fast we can test the software we may have these run in production for Christmas 🙂 the goal is to make 64-bit ARM with EUR 64 retail price!

As I expect A64 with 4 cores Cortex-A53 will behave well running Desktop Linux so we are evaluating the option to find some Chinese laptop manufacturer and ask them to supply us just with some light laptop body with decent 10.1-11.6″ LCD display, camera and keyboard with touch-pad. We can re-design A64 board to fit inside this laptop body and to make light under 1 kg laptop running Linux.

One of the problem is that A64 is quite new and no any Linux-Sunxi support, as nobody have seen A64 development boards yet. SO it may pass several months until A64-OLinuXino run anything else than Android 5.1