The HiKey 960 is an amazing looking board, based around the Huawei Kirin 960 octa-core ARM big.LITTLE™ processor with four ARM Cortex-A73 and four Cortex-A53 cores with 3GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM memory, 32GB of UFS 2.1 flash storage, and the latest generation Mali-G71 MP8 graphics processor.
The HiKey 960 is meant to be a go-to PC for Android or a tool to develop software and drivers for the OS. The board development was backed by Linaro, an organization that develops software packages for the Android OS and ARM architecture.
“We are very pleased to be working with Linaro members ARM, Huawei, Google, Archermind and LeMaker on this product”, said George Grey, Linaro CEO. “The HiKey 960 delivers on the goal of 96Boards to provide access to the latest ARM technology to the developer community, with support for the latest Huawei mobile SoC featuring high performance ARM Cortex®-A73 cores coupled with the latest generation of ARM Mali™ GPU technology.”
Google develops Android to run on multiple architectures and the Linaro engagement is in particular aimed at collaboration with ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) partners. Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has been a key part of Linaro’s work since its founding in 2010, and Linaro’s AOSP contributions have now spanned 24 kernel versions from Linux kernel 2.6.36 in Android Honeycomb (3.0) to Linux 4.10 today. The HiKey 960 will be the second HiKey officially supported as an Android reference board and it will bring new levels of performance to Android developers.
HiKey 960 board Specifications
SoC: Kirin 960 octa-core CPU with 4x Cortex-A73 cores to 2.4 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 cores to 1.8 GHz and Mali-G71 MP8 GPU
Software: AOSP with 4.4 AOSP common kernel
Storage: 32GB UFS 2.1 flash storage and microSD card slot
Video Output / Display Interface: HDMI 1.2a up to 1080p plus 4-lane MIPI DSI
Connectivity: Dual-band 802.11 b/g/n/ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1 with on board antennas
USB: 2 x USB 3.0 type A host ports, 1 x USB 2.0 type C OTG port
Camera: 1x 4-lane MIPI CSI, 1x 2-lane MIPI CSI
Expansion: PCIe Gen2 on M.2 Key connector; 40-pin low speed expansion connector +1.8V, +5V, DC power, GND, 2x UART, 2x I2C, SPI, I2S, 12x GPIO; 60-pin high speed expansion connector 4L MIPI DSI, 2L+4L MIPI CSI, 2x I2C, SPI (48M), USB 2.0
Misc: LEDs for WiFi & Bluetooth, 4x user LEDs, power button
Power Supply: 8V-18V/2A via 4.75/1.7mm power barrel (EIAJ-3 Compliant),12V/2A power supply recommended
Dimensions: 85mm x 55mm
More details on the 96boards
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