$89 Exynos4412 1.7Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 2GB

Re:$89 Exynos4412 1.7Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 2GB by ergo14 on Friday December 28, 2012 @06:13AM (#4977286)

The problem with all those board - except rapsberry pi is that there are no proper gpu hardware drivers for them - at least under linux. So one can't build linux based XBMC media centre on them to play HD movies :( When it comes tocheap boards only r-pi can do this, other boards can only do this when you use Android on them :(

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Re:$89 Exynos4412 1.7Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 2GB by mightytarzan on Friday December 28, 2012 @06:34AM (#4977315)

Depends on what you mean by "proper" drivers. The GPU drivers for the Raspberry Pi, like the drivers for most other development boards, consist of an open-source shim and a closed-source userspace blob [1].

HD decoding on these boards is performed using a digital signal processor (DSP) integrated into the SOC, the CPU (even with GPU support) is too slow for 1080P h264 Content. This is not specific to Android, for example TI supports use of the DSP of the Pandaboard on Linux as well [2] (it is still not very stable, at least on the OMAP 4430 version of the Pandaboard).

[1] http://airlied.livejournal.com/76383.html

[2] https://launchpad.net/~tiomap-dev/+archive/release

Edit: formatting

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Re:$89 Exynos4412 1.7Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 2GB by ergo14 on Friday December 28, 2012 @06:58AM (#4977355)

yes - but for exynos or allwinner 10 you dont even have that shim :( - thats what i meant - you basicly cant run XBMC on linux on those with acceptable performance as of today. Im hoping this situation will change soon, but it looks like there is no interest by soc vendors to provide necessary tools.

I know this works on pandaboard and some others, but those boards are about 150$ range if i remember correctly.

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Re:$89 Exynos4412 1.7Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 2GB by mightytarzan on Friday December 28, 2012 @07:27AM (#4977417)

Hmm Allwinner A1X and Exynos 4412 both have integrated Mali 400 GPUs, so there should be at least some GPU support on Linux [1].

There is an unofficial XBMC port for A1X devices which supports the HW Video Decoder of the SOC [2]. I have an A10 device at work, but unfortunately won't be in the office to play around with it for some time.

[1] http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400

[2] http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC

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Re:$89 Exynos4412 1.7Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 2GB by ergo14 on Friday December 28, 2012 @07:39AM (#4977450)

http://www.j1nx.nl/xbmc-allwinner-a10-apologies-received-acc...

According to what XBMC devs say - it doesnt work at this point, and there is some online drama going on ;-)

Although i would be super happy to see progress on this.

One of the links you gave me: "Allwinner officially only supports the Mali GPU driver on the Android platform only." :(

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