Dual-Core Allwinner A20 Powered EOMA-68 Engineering Card Available

A year after the first schematics were completed and a few months after the first prototype board shipped, Make Play Live has released Improv, the first engineering card for EOMA-68 (EOMA-68 is a specification for modular systems that splits the cpu board from the rest of the system, allowing the end user to use the same core with several devices or upgrade e.g. a tablet without having to pay for a new screen shell). From Aaron Seigo's weblog post: "The hardware of Improv is extremely capable: a dual-core ARM® Cortex-A7 System on Chip (SoC) running at 1Ghz, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of on-board NAND flash and a powerful OpenGL ES GPU. To access all of this hardware goodness there are a variety of ports: 2 USB2 ports (one fullsize host, one micro OTG), SD card reader, HDMI, ethernet (10/100, though the feature card has a Gigabit connector; more on that below), SATA, i2c, VGA/TTL and 8 GPIO pins. The entire device weighs less than 100 grams, is passively cooled and fits in your hand. Improv comes pre-installed with Mer OS, sporting a recent Linux kernel, systemd, and a wide variety of software tools. By default it boots into console, so if you are making a headless device you needn't worry about extra overhead running that you don't need. If you are going to hook it up to a screen (or two), then you have an amazing starting point with choices such as X.org, Wayland, Qt4, Qt5 and a full complement of KDE libraries and Plasma Workspaces. Improv takes advantage of the open EOMA68 standard to deliver a unique design: the SoC, RAM and storage live on one card (the 'CPU card'), the feature ports are on a PCB it docks with (the 'feature board'). The two dock securely together with the CPU card sitting under the feature board nestled in a pair of rails; they are undocked from each other by pushing a mechanical ejector button." Check out the specs and pictures. The card is available now for $75. Improv is open hardware, with the schematics licensed under the GPL and available soon.

Comments

Re:Extremely capable?

[stilborne]

This is an engineering board, not a smartphone. If you look around what is available for prototyping and developing projects, you'll find that single core ARM is actually the common case. This is a significant amount of hardware for the market category. This is also considerably more powerful than what smartphones were shipping with 3 years ago, though today's high end phones do come with more cores.

Lets try to clear up some missinformation here

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey all,

I'm oliver, from http://linux-sunxi.org, the community revolving around the kernel development around this SoC.

First off, the BOARD is OSWH, not the SoC. Now, for those who'd only call it OSHW if the VHDL code would be available, while utopian, that's just plain silly. OpenCores is for that ;) So yeah, this is all OSHW goodness.

Then, documentation wise, yes we lack a lot. Allwinner hasn't released everything to anybody yet, some pieces haven't received any docs at all yet, most likely because it hasn't been written yet, some pieces they can't share the docs as they are under NDA themselves. But for most bits that's not important as we do have code for pretty much everything. The docs we do have, are the 'standard' usermanual, in english, with a lot (but as said before not all) register information. You can download and view them over at http://dl.linux-sunxi.org/ in the various subdirectories. The only closed blobs right now are GPS, GPU and VPU.

Now, the GPS isn't really that important and it hasn't been reverse engineered yet, is because there's no hardware using the GPS. Most platforms use UART or USB for GPS so this hasn't been on anybody's radar. We do have a gps.ko with debugging symbols so once the need arises, it's doable, nobody really just had a need for this.

The GPU, talented Luc Verhagen has been working for the past 1 - 2 years on the LIMA project. This allows a fully opensource stack to be used with the MALI GPU. Luc actually uses the A10/A20 as main development platform (amongst another one). While this is still very much WiP I'm sure we all seen the quake timedemo Luc did last year at fosdem where he actually beat the ARM binary mali blob. Here is his latest mesa work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WOILEYAxWE but we have to be honest, it's not done yet, so for now we are still stuck with the mali blobs. But yeah, hold your breath for that one.

The VPU is also being reverse engineerd. This is much further behind of LIMA so I shouldn't talk too much about it and get people excited yet, but here's a decoding demo: http://linux-sunxi.org/Reverse_Engineering/Cedar_Status where you can see we can decode h264 video without using any proprietary blobs (mali isn't needed for this).

Then finally, compared to all other SoC's out there that do have some form of Linux support, the Allwinner chip is one of the limited ones, that actually have u-boot support. I'd almost say full u-boot, but MTD support is still WiP.

So to compare this to the Raspberry Pi, It's much faster (armv7 vs armv6, hard-float available, dual core CPU and dual core GPU, up to 2 GiB ram possible to name just a few).

Finally, is everything open? No, the BROM isn't open source, the BOOT-ROM, a 32k block embedded (unchangable) in the chip that performs initial boot. What it does is check the supported media (SPI, NAND, SD) for a valid signature and boots it. I'm quite sure the same blob is in any CPU on the market right now. Your AMD or Intel CPU also has a bootrom, that tells it to load the bios from SPI into ram and start executing it. So this is moot, but I do think it's fair mentioning it.

So hopefully I've put some things to rest here, if not I'll try to check back at a later date and reply appropriately.

If you want more info, I'm planning to hold a talk at FOSDEM 2014 so stay tuned over at http://fosdem.org

Re:Lets try to clear up some missinformation here

[david.given]

The RPi is an ARMv6, while this (along with pretty much every other modern ARM device) is an ARMv7. The ARMv6 has hardfloat but implements a slightly different version of the spec. Most OSes have standardised on the ARMv7 version which means that their code won't run on the ARMv6. So Debian armhf will run on this but will not run on the RPi: you have to use Raspbian instead, which is a version of Debian specifically compiled for the ARMv6. (Of course, Debian armel will run on both, but then you don't get any hardware floating point support.)

The Broadcom GPU is significantly awesome. It is, however, almost totally undocumented. There's a reverse engineering project which has mostly nailed down the instruction set, and there are even some C compilers for it (one of them is mine!) even though there's no gcc or LLVM support for it. You can write programs in C and run them on the bare metal. Unfortunately the GPU doesn't support double-precision float and the MMU is kinda weird, and it's probably going to be slower than the ARM for non-DSP-heavy code anyway, so it's unlikely you'll see Linux for it any time soon. But it's a beautiful, beautiful architecture to write code for. (And it's dual core! Not very many people know that...)

Re:How is it compared to Rasp Pi ?

[Narishma]

As others have said, the Pi has an FPU and supports hard float. The issue with running Ubuntu on the Pi is that they only support ARMv7 while the Pi is ARMv6. I also don't think the Mali 400 MP2 in this thing is more powerful than the Videocore IV in the Pi.

Re:VGA port?

[lkcl]

as for other CPU cards, those are further away but on the roadmap.

they are indeed. tracking down a cost-effective desirable SoC from - and this is also a really important bit - a fabless semiconductor company that respects the GPL - is very very hard. let's go through the list so far of CPU Cards that i've 30-98% made the PCB CAD/CAM drawings for (the A20 one is the only one that's reached 100% completion so far)

* AM3389 CPU Card. GPL-compliant: yes. cost-effective: most definitely not. desirable: well, it turned out that there was a proprietary blob for HDMI, and it was to be an FSF-Endorseable CPU Card, so no.

* iMX6 CPU Card. GPL-compliant: yes. cost-effective: at $35 for a quad-core SoC in 1k volumes when the competition is $USD 12: mmmm.... no. desirable: yes.

* Ingenic jz4760 CPU Card. GPL-compliant: yes. cost-effective: yes (around $7). desirable: as it's only a 1ghz single-core MIPS with no HDMI output... mmm... no not really.

* Rockchip RK3188 Quad-core CPU Card. GPL-compliant: no. only "leaked" source code is available. cost-effective: yes (around $12. for quad-core! amazing). desirable: yes (good features). but, the GPL-compliance nixes it. that and the huge NREs demanded by rockchip for their development board details.

the list keeps going on and on like this. much of these issues go away once we have some sales. so if you'd like to see this project succeed, help out by buying one of these engineering boards. in the future you'll be able to re-purpose the old CPU Card by getting an alternative chassis (just the chassis), or you'd be able to sell the old CPU Card on ebay.