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New Oranges with H5 and H2+

Igor

By Igor
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Guest Nz1

Guest Nz1

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I zoomed in on the cpu and it says its quad core, which is different to what was said about this processor on the datasheet from cnx-software, which said 8 core. Would be interesting to know more about this cpu and how is it different to A64 etc.

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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This is more like an outdated roadmap than info :)

 

H5 is quad core as can be seen from pictures and the following is also obvious:

  • OPi 3: quad core Cortex-A53, 2 GB DRAM, GBit Ethernet (RTL8211E), WiFi + BT (8189ETV? RTL8723BS), no eMMC
  • OPi PC 2: quad core Cortex-A53, 1 GB DRAM (or 2GB using 8Gb modules?), GBit Ethernet (RTL8211E), no WiFi, no eMMC

So I would suppose H5 is just like H64 but without PMIC/battery support (!) and maybe with as much real USB host ports as H3 (or is U25 an USB hub?). Next question: Which voltage regulator will be used to provide VDD_CPUX?

 

EDIT: According to rumours (linux-sunxi IRC from a week ago) H5 is just like A64 but with HDMI 2.0 and better GPU (Mali450 with more cores) but the other obvious difference is missing PMIC support.

 

2nd EDIT: The WiFi module on OPi 3 looks like RTL8723BS so board could also have BT capabilities.

 

BTW: the last leaked 'info' looked differently: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=521  (PC 2 back then was just a 2GB version of H3 based OPi PC -- but in the meantime Plus 2E stepped in to fill the gap -- and OPi 3 was H64 based that is known to provide only one real USB host port)

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Guest Guest

Guest Guest

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Thanks

Interesting that there is no emmc. I had thought that the $20 orange pi pc was starting a trend with soldered emmc, but apparently not.

Maybe they will use spi flash as mentioned above to help make booting more user friendly Also I hope they make mmc access 8 bit and so speed up sdcard read/writes.

I am not sure what will eventually give reliable fast permanent storage for these computers, maybe usb3 or pcie access.

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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Interesting that there is no emmc. I had thought that the $20 orange pi pc was starting a trend with soldered emmc, but apparently not.

 

Well, currently all Orange Pi with onboard eMMC have a 'Plus' in their name so by looking at names and the lower PCB side I would expect we'll see both 'OPi 3 Plus' and 'OPi PC 2 Plus' eMMC equipped later this year (the PC 2 + then maybe also featuring RTL8723BS)

 

Regarding USB3 or PCIe I would not expect to get here anything anytime soon from Allwinner (I would call the USB3 experiment on A80 a fail). But there exist rumours Steven/Xunlong is working on another 64-bit based board featuring both (oviously not using an Allwinner SoC).

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RagnerBG

RagnerBG

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Interesting that there is no emmc. I had thought that the $20 orange pi pc was starting a trend with soldered emmc, but apparently not.

 

There is already Orange Pi PC Plus, with EMMC and wifi module.

About those new boards, if H5 is only 4 A53 cores, what's the difference from A64? Aldo they can put even 16 ARM cores, but without proper OpenGL (ES) support and hw video (and audio?) acceleration, simple things like web browsing will be toil. And i hope with new video engine there is at least G2D processing.

By the way, last 2 pictures - i see only angles, lot of angles, make me feel uncomfortable :).

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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if H5 is only 4 A53 cores, what's the difference from A64?

 

Well, listing the obvious, the rumours and some (my) hope it is

  • no PMIC support with H5 (so no battery support and it gets interesting how voltage regulation for CPU cores will be done -- board specific)
  • HDMI 2.0 vs. 1.4
  • Mali450MP vs. Mali400MP GPU (also said to contain more GPU cores)
  • Not 1 USB host/HSIC port as with A64/H64 but 3 USB host ports on H5 just like with H3

(the last 3 have to be confirmed)

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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About the 3 USB host ports, as we can see in H3, it depends on what chinese manufacturers will decide to expand from SoC.

 

Well, on both boards one Micro USB connector provides USB OTG and there are 3 type A receptables as on OPi PC, PC Plus or Plus 2E. So either there is an USB hub somewhere on the board (only chip possible is U25 in SO-8 package -- but I doubt an USB hub IC has just 8 pins) or these 3 are connected directly to the SoC which would mean H5 has at least 3 real USB host ports or an internal USB hub (which would we somewhat weird IMO)

 

BTW: since nearly all nice 'HDMI 2.0' features are optional I would wait until at least some information about H5 is available (currently it's zero information except of the obvious: quad core and no PMIC)

 

And also: placement of all connectors/buttons on PC 2 is identical to PC and PC Plus so enclosures are compatible. Same for OPi 3 and Plus 2E :)

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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Allwinner redesigned their website. H64 is gone, H5 has 3 real USB host ports (and a 6 core Mali450 GPU and other display/video improvements compared to A64) and they finally announced R40 (quad-core A7, 2 x USB host + SATA, GbE). R40 is said to be the 'A20 Upgrade Edition: Dual-core upgrade to Quad-core(CPU), 55nm upgrade to 40nm(Craft), lower power consumption, smaller package.' -- ok, time to stop wasting efforts with H3 and H5, let's wait for R40 hardware to appear  B)

 

BTW: For R40 is also mentioned: 'Open Sources: Supports our own lightweight Linux OS called Tina, which specialized designed for smart hardware' -- well, let's see how Allwinner's definition of Open Source will look like ;)

 

Edit: First device already appeared: Banana Pi BPi-M2 Ultra. Well, 'Team BPi' continues with their 'copy&paste gone wrong' crap (according to their 'documentation' the board has either 3 USB host ports -- which would mean they use an internal USB hub -- or just 2 which would be the count of host ports R40 features) and chose a pretty misleading name: BPi M2 was based on A31s, BPi M2+ on H3 and 'M2 Ultra' has nothing in common with both since it's in a direct line with the original A20 based Bananas. Also M2 should indicate that M3 is a better choice (which it's clearly not, worst software/support ever, hardware design flaws, not possible to get performance by specs in reality)

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PoV

PoV

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Hey actually I noticed something unusual in the H5 specs list.

 

sdio3.png

 

For one, the H5 makes mention SDIO 3.0 interfaces. Does this mean we'll finally getting better SD card performance? My Googling of the 3.0 spec seems to say so (50-104 MB cap, instead of ~25 MB), but I don't want to let myself get too excited.  ;)

 

Secondly, it says it has three of them!?

 

Now, this could be an error. The other diagram explicitly doesn't mention multiple SD interfaces, but damn, I want the SBC with 3 SD card slots you can plug high speed cards in to, and make them in to a RAID array.  :D

 

Do SDIO to SATA adapters exist?  :P

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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Secondly, it says it has three of them!?

 

'Just like H3' -- one for SD card, one for eMMC, one for WiFi ;)

 

How fast SD card or eMMC can operate is always board specific (requires voltage switching and appriopriate drivers). Better expect for the single SD card slot you'll find on H5 devices the usual ~23MB/s limitation (50 MHz with 4 bit minus overhead).

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rufik

rufik

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 time to stop wasting efforts with H3 and H5, let's wait for R40 hardware to appear  B)

 

Is the A7 core performance (H3) in pair with A53 (H5) when using Armbian/Ubuntu? Because if A53 can perform about 30% faster in general, then there is sense to have H5 support...

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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Because if A53 can perform about 30% faster in general, then there is sense to have H5 support...

 

Nope. Looking only at integer CPU performance and crappy benchmark numbers/graphs is plain silly (but unfortunately done everywhere). The important stuff happens somewhere else (random IO, good settings, using the available SoC engines as best as possible -- think about video encoding/decoding and GPU) and H5 support will come anyway (thanks to linux-sunxi community).

 

But there's no reason to favour a H5 due to other CPU cores over another SoC that is way more performant for specific use cases (even if it looks not that good in moronic 'CPU benchmarks'). Just read through this to get the idea: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1925-some-storage-benchmarks-on-sbcs/  (the 'slowest' board shows the best performance)

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rufik

rufik

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Yes, I know, use case first.

What I mean "in general" is dealing with archives (apt-get, zip, tar, etc), usb printer/scanner, Munin graphing, dlna audio, some crontab scripts, rsync, maybe some video encoding from time to time. Nothing really heavy, but CPU and DRAM speed matters mostly. If I can do these task with H5 about 30% faster, I'll go for it :-)

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hojnikb

hojnikb

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It's not necessery, that H5 will end up faster in cpu workloads. Given that A53 cores are actually less efficient than A7, it means that if SoC is fabricated on the same type of fab process (most likely 28nm) this will cause more heat which will translate into quicker throttling than A7.

 

But under burst loads and with a proper heatsink, A53/H5 should be faster because of the newer architecture alone (let alone ARMv8 optimizations).

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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(most likely 28nm)

 

Most likely it's 40nm as with A64 now. Allwinner's dual-core A7 (A20) is made in 55nm, the quad-core A7 (H3) in 40nm. The former does not overheat (that much), the latter does. Allwinner's octa-core A7 (A83T/H8/R58 and the 4 other names it has that I already forgot) is made in 28nm and overheats like hell. It's really not that simple ;)

 

I would suppose H5 is more or less like A64 internally as long as CPU cores are affected (it's said to contain a better GPU and video engines). But unlike A64 that comes with PMIC support where we're able to adjust VDD_CPUX in 20mV steps, H5 does not.

 

That's one of the open questions: How does voltage regulation looks like? Since when it's done like with H3 (board vendor can choose between 3 options) then we might end up just like with H3: after resolving the overvoltage mess we got some boards that do not overheat that much (the bigger Oranges), some that overheat little (smaller Oranges), some that overheat even more (NanoPi M1) and some that perform here really bad (NEO, Beelink X2 and Banana Pi M2+)

 

So at the time of this writing it's only speculation.

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hojnikb

hojnikb

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Most likely it's 40nm as with A64 now. Allwinner's dual-core A7 (A20) is made in 55nm, the quad-core A7 (H3) in 40nm. The former does not overheat (that much), the latter does. Allwinner's octa-core A7 (A83T/H8/R58 and the 4 other names it has that I already forgot) is made in 28nm and overheats like hell. It's really not that simple ;)

 

I would suppose H5 is more or less like A64 internally as long as CPU cores are affected (it's said to contain a better GPU and video engines). But unlike A64 that comes with PMIC support where we're able to adjust VDD_CPUX in 20mV steps, H5 does not.

 

That's one of the open questions: How does voltage regulation looks like? Since when it's done like with H3 (board vendor can choose between 3 options) then we might end up just like with H3: after resolving the overvoltage mess we got some boards that do not overheat that much (the bigger Oranges), some that overheat little (smaller Oranges), some that overheat even more (NanoPi M1) and some that perform here really bad (NEO, Beelink X2 and Banana Pi M2+)

 

So at the time of this writing it's only speculation.

 

Multiple sources suggest, that A20 is 40nm and H3 is 28nm.

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tkaiser

tkaiser

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Multiple sources suggest, that A20 is 40nm and H3 is 28nm.

 

Yeah, that's one of the problems with the internet: Copy&paste everywhere. At least one source (Allwinner) confirmed that A20 is 55nm by calling the R40 successor an 'A20 Upgrade Edition: Dual-core upgrade to Quad-core(CPU), 55nm upgrade to 40nm(Craft), lower power consumption, smaller package'.

 

Allwinner never talked about H3's process but since H3 is almost the same as A64 with different CPU cores (and there we got the confirmation by an email from Allwinner's A64 PM to Pine64 folks) and based on the thermal behaviour I would assume it's 40nm. Please don't ask me why in our linux-sunxi wiki 28nm is written (and copied from there everywhere else). Maybe it's based on this article http://hackerboards.com/quad-core-allwinner-soc-targets-low-cost-4k-ott-set-top-boxes/ (confusing H8 with H3)?

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hojnikb

hojnikb

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Yeah, that's one of the problems with the internet: Copy&paste everywhere. At least one source (Allwinner) confirmed that A20 is 55nm by calling the R40 successor an 'A20 Upgrade Edition: Dual-core upgrade to Quad-core(CPU), 55nm upgrade to 40nm(Craft), lower power consumption, smaller package'.

 

Allwinner never talked about H3's process but since H3 is almost the same as A64 with different CPU cores (and there we got the confirmation by an email from Allwinner's A64 PM to Pine64 folks) and based on the thermal behaviour I would assume it's 40nm. Please don't ask me why in our linux-sunxi wiki 28nm is written (and copied from there everywhere else). Maybe it's based on this article http://hackerboards.com/quad-core-allwinner-soc-targets-low-cost-4k-ott-set-top-boxes/ (confusing H8 with H3)?

 

That would certainly explain thermal behavior and very low cost nature of H3. Guess we should fix the wiki, so no more misinformation 

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TamiGeorge

TamiGeorge

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Hi..i am a new user here and interested in developing electronics things using this type of boards only. I want to know if H5 is only 4 A53 cores, what's the difference from A64? They can put even 16 ARM cores, but without proper OpenGL support and video acceleration, simple things like web browsing will be toil. And i hope with new video engine there is at least G2D processing.

 

china pcb assembly

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