ARM Cortex-A55

For all your Raspberry Pi's, BeagleBoard's, Parallella's, ORDROID'S, TV boxes et al.
User avatar
Dirk Broer
Corsair
Corsair
Posts: 1962
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:24 pm
Location: Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands
Contact:

#1 ARM Cortex-A55

Post by Dirk Broer »

The ARM workhorse SOC, the Cortex-A53, is being replaced with the newer ARM Cortex-A55 in SBC-land. As Wikipedia says:
"The Cortex-A55 serves as the successor of the ARM Cortex-A53, designed to improve performance and energy efficiency over the A53. ARM has stated the A55 should have 15% improved power efficiency and 18% increased performance relative to the A53. Memory access and branch prediction are also improved relative to the A53."
and
"The Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 cores are the first products to support ARM's DynamIQ technology. The successor to big.LITTLE, this technology is designed to be more flexible and scalable when designing multi-core products."
Let's stick to the Cortex-A55 boards for the moment, what can you buy at the moment?
Image click on image for a better view!
Note the increased RAM size as compared to the earlier Cortex-A53 boards.

These specs seem to be given by marketeers rather than engineers, as I could not get any information as to the speed or bandwith of the Banana Pi M5 LPDDR4 RAM, and Hardkernel gives their RAM as having a 32-bit bus while Radxa claims to have 64-bit dual channel RAM.
Nor could I obtain any clear information as to the execution engines within the GPUs, as Hardkernel gives four for both the Mali G31 and G52, and Radxa gives only two for the Mali G52. Banana Pi doesn't even mention execution engines...and they are what's making your OpenCL go.
Image
User avatar
Dirk Broer
Corsair
Corsair
Posts: 1962
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:24 pm
Location: Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands
Contact:

#2 Re: ARM Cortex-A55

Post by Dirk Broer »

The all-new Odroid-M1 is the odd one out in the table of the previous post. Instead of the Raspberry Pi form factor (like the other A55 boards) it is 90 by 122mm -and that's the size of the board alone. The immense heatsink itself is even 100 x 123 x 19mm! No wonder it doesn't seem to need active cooling....
Image
Without any external peripherals connected, the M1 power consumption is said to be about 4.5 Watt with a very heavy computing load, and it could even be as low as 1.3 Watt in the idle state. Considering the present price for a kWh, this is very good news indeed.
Image

BTW: the 'old' Odroid-C4 even did a just 3.3 Watt under a very heavy computing load, but only comes in a 4 GB version and with a much smaller heatsink -that can be replaced with e.g. a Noctua NC-U6 with an optionally attached 60mm fan, using the same two holes that hold the original heatsink...
Image
Post Reply Previous topicNext topic

Return to “Single-board Computers”