Allwinner is slated to launch its very first octa-chip this year, with the company planning to show off the new silicon at CES 2014 in Las Vegas (January), alongside tablets based on the current lineup of A23, A31, and A31S processors.
According to Liliputing’s Brad Linder, the Allwinner A80 Optimus Board is basically a small SBC with an 8-core processor, USB ports, developer pins and other features to help hardware modders and devs create apps around the new chip.
“The Allwinner A80 features 4 ARM Cortex-A15 processor cores and 4 ARM Cortex-A7 cores,” Linder explained.
“They’re arranged using ARM’s big.LITTLE technology so that you can use just the cores you need to perform a certain task, which means the chip is optimized to offer high performance and low power consumption, depending on the application.”
Although Samsung has offered similar processors since early 2013, Linder points out that Allwinner is known for offering low-cost silicon targeted specifically at low-cost tablets.
