A80 OptimusBoard powered by AllWinner A80 octa-core processor with four Cortex A15 and four Cortex A7 in big.LITTLE configuration had been announced at the end of 2013, and after numerous delays, several boards have recently been sent to developers and companies such as miniNodes, Linuxium, and others. The company behind the board is actually Shenzhen Merrii Technology (aka WITS), which had done all earlier development kits for AllWinner, and they’ve now made the board available for purchase on Aliexpress. Unfortunately the company has decided to leave to low cost development boards market to the likes of Cubieboard8 and PCDuino8, as A80 OptimusBoard sells for $345 plus about $30 for shipping by courier.[Update: they now offer it for $169]

SoC – AllWinner Ultra Core A80 4x Cortex 15, 4x Cortex A7 big.LITTLE processor with Imagination Technologies PowerVR GC6230 GPU with 64-cores, and support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.0, Directx 9.3

System Memory – 2GB DDR3

Storage – 8GB NAND Flash + micro SD card up to 32GB

Video Output – HDMI 1.4a up to 4K30

Audio – AC100 Codec, headphone jack

Video Playback – UHD/4K H.264/VP8 4Kx2K @ 30 fps

Connectivity – Dual band Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 (AP6330), and Gigabit Ethernet (GMAC)

USB – 1x USB 3.0 OTG port, 2x USB 2.0 host ports

Camera I/F – 16MP MIPI CSI

Debugging – UART and JTAG

Expansion – 32-pin GPIO header

Misc – IR receiver, reset and power LEDs.

Power management – AXP806, AXP809 “smart power management specialist”

Power Supply – 5V/3A, or battery

Dimensions – 135x70mm

The board comes with a power adapter, and a UART to USB cable. The board comes pre-loaded with Android 4.4.2 on top of Linux 3.4.39. So it’s not a device tree capable kernel, allegedly because AllWinner does not have enough good kernel developers… AllWinner promised support for 5 Operating Systems, but AFAIK, only Android has been provided at this stage, so we may need to wait a little longer for Ubuntu, Chrome/Chromium OS, Firefox OS, and Windows.

You can watch the video below for an overview of the board, and they also quickly show a “professional” AllWinner A80 development board.

Via armdevices.net