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Allwinner H3 Quad Core Cortex-A7 OTT TV-Box (aka Beelink X2)

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sfx2000

Part of the Furniture
Been busy with various changes here at Casa de SFX...

Android IPTV box - board pron below - amazing what they've done... it's the tight integration of the Allwinner H3 Quad Cortex-A7 chip - two DDR3 chips (1GB total), an 8GB eMMC, and little else...

The AllWinner H3 SoC is a Quad Cortex-A7 with MALI400MP on a 28nm process - all IO is on-chip, so the peripherals you see are line-level drivers...

The daughterboard over on the lower right hand is the 802.11 b/g/n AMPAK 6181 SIP (BCM 4330 series WiFi only, no BT) - board connectors going clockwise from bottom left - DC power In, USB, HDMI (1.4), 10/100 ethernet (can see the mag coupling for the MII), ToSLink, USB, T-Flash (MicroSD), red switch is power, and a PIFA on the CCA over on the lower right for Wireless - easy enough to tell by the shape, but also because there's no copper layer there other than the antenna...

Less than $32USD, runs Android 4.4...

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For $32, I cannot even summon my critcal nature to ask what you intend to do with it. :)

The only negative I see is Android... (but forget that I said that.)
 
lol... I just saw the sheep. I love stuff like that.
 
For $32, I cannot even summon my critical nature...

Think about it... with the 8GB eMMC, 1GB DDR3 RAM, this puts the SoC (QuadCore ARMv7 Cortex-A7@1.2GHz) at around 9 dollars...

Total BOM on this device is probably around $27USD, counting component and conversion costs, which is very interesting, as it's not far removed from the $400+ Router/AP's that the vendors are offering...

The main SoC is $6, which compared to Intel's Baytrail-CR Z3537G @ $17USD, and it still needs more than this chip has, and it can't do 4K output...pretty amazing actually in some aspects - but considering performance/watt, and now performance/cost, ARM does seem to be the best bet on the lower end...

And it's not just media playback - Android on this box - decent browser performance as well...

AllWinner's costs on the SoC are pretty low, as it's all ARM blocks for the most part, from the cores to the GPU (Mali400), and it scales nicely to 28nm, which works very well with Chinese foundries... (they're new, so 28nm is reasonable, 20nm was a bit of a trouble, but TSMC seems good with 16nm, Samsung/Intel at 14nm, putting things into perspective)

Like I said earlier - interesting box... much like the experimenter/hobby boards, but more focused (lack of GPIO pins is a good example here)
 
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Quick update - I've edited the posts above for clarity/corrections on the HW side...

I'm still tinkering around with the unit, looking at the Software/Firmware... notes later...
 
i wonder how this compares to the raspberry pi 2. Both use ARM A7 quad cores but use different chips and have different IOs and different GPUs.

Different GPU (Mali400MP) and AllWinners homegrown video encode/decode - closest hobby/dev board would be the OrangePI (same SoC, all the nice GPIO breakouts, USB-OTG, etc...) - the AllWinner H3 SoC is decently documented, but not as well, IMHO, as the docs for the Broadcom chip on Pi/Pi2/PiZero/Pi3...
 

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