Pine H64 Development Board Features Allwinner H6 processor, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 and PCIe for $26 and Up

As expected, Pine64 has now launched Pine H64 development board, powered by Allwinner H6 quad core processor, and contrary to Orange Pi H6 boards, it exposes both Gigabit Ethernet, and a USB 3.0 port, which should please people wanting fast storage combined with Gigabit Ethernet.

The board comes in three variants with 1, 2 or 3GB of memory, with all also equipped with a mini PCIe interface, and various I/O headers.

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Pine H64 specifications:

  • SoC – Allwinner H6 quad core Cortex A53 processor with Arm Mali-T720MP2 GPU
  • System Memory – 1, 2 or 3GB LPDDR3 PC-1600 RAM
  • Storage – 128 Mbit SPI flash, micro SD card slot, and eMMC flash module connector (all bootable)
  • Video Output – HDMI 2.0a up to 4K @ 60 Hz
  • Audio – HDMI audio output,
  • Video Decoding – 10-bit H.265 up to 4K @ 60 fps, VP9 and H.264 up to 4K @ 30 fps
  • Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, headers for SDIO 3.0/UART wireless module
  • USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 2x USB 2.0 host ports
  • Expansion
    • 1x mini PCIe slot
    • 40-pin Pi2 GPIO bus
    • Euler GPIO bus
  • Misc – IR receiver, RTC
  • Power Supply – 5V/3A
  • Dimensions –  127 x 79 mm (Same as Pine A64 board)

It’s worth noting there’s no information on the Wiki yet, and the company clearly states “PINE H64 is still in early stage development cycle, the current board condition is only suitable for developer and early adopter”, so it’s not for everybody, as software support is not there yet. We do know the board will support both Android and Linux distributions, and that Allwinner will/has release(d) a Linux 4.9 BSP, so a fairly recent kernel will be used with the board, and linux-sunxi will likely be working on mainline Linux and U-boot support for the SoC and board.

Price is quite competitive with the 1GB RAM version selling for $25.99, the 2GB RAM version for $35.99, and the 3GB board for $45.00. This does not include shipping, and accessories like the power supply. You’ll find the purchase links on Pine64 store.

In other news, the company also launch SOPINE clusterboard taking 7 Sopine64 systems-on-module for $99 with one free SoM for a limited time, but I cover this into more details tomorrow.

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27 Comments
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tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

The Allwinner 4.9 BSP (in beta state) as well as the 4.4 based BSPs for the older H SoCs can be found here: https://github.com/Allwinner-Homlet?tab=repositories

Gabe
Gabe
6 years ago
subzero
subzero
6 years ago

H6 Soc have a 4xTS-interface … so my question is,does the Pine H64 have connection to it,
maybe via the “Euler” pins?

hex
hex
6 years ago

What kind of PCIe?, ı mean GEN2 or GEN3?

jim st
jim st
6 years ago

Woodward

Keith, if you saw my briefly posted complaint about not finding the boards, my browser opened up with the Rock 64 stuff at the top. After churning for a bit, it expanded the thumb and a huge page opened. I searched and found the H64. Thanks for the link. I’m studying it.

I deleted the original comment.

The Pinebook 14″ caught my eye too. Will be studying these.

mdel
mdel
6 years ago

can the H6 boot from a pcie storage device ?

i imagine the onboard spi flash could take care of initial uboot / kernel with a fs on a pcie storage..

Real world performance tests of the various high i/o buses will tell if the price is fair or not really.

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

mdel : Real world performance tests of the various high i/o buses will tell if the price is fair or not really. LOL. A certain amount of SBC users for whatever obscure reasons think they need as much RAM as possible (and never look at ‘free’ output to see that all they get is just the kernel using more DRAM for buffers/caches). They will buy the 3GB version for no reason and are happy. Same with PCIe and USB3. These are associated with 5Gbps and so people are happy regardless of real world performance (see Allwinner SATA, I don’t know… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

Almost forgot to mention. If it’s still as on the early prototypes then this board also supports USB2 data lines on the mPCIe connector. So it’s also suitable to attach LTE modems there but only those that feature an own SIM card slot on the card. And if USB on the mPCIe connector is used then IIRC one of the 2 USB2 receptacles doesn’t work any more.

AFAIK Pine folks are pretty busy at the moment (and on their way to FOSDEM) but they promised to upload recent schematics of the board to the wiki early next week.

Jeroen
6 years ago

Might be a nice NAS board if you add a “4 Port SATA III Mini PCI-e Controller Card”

theguyuk
theguyuk
6 years ago

One of the things I see keep coming up is people have different uses in mind for these devices so as normal what is terrible to one person is useable for another. I have a hobby interest in Indie film making, I edit, cut, transcode my own mini films. I use a elderly Intel duel core laptop, a elderly ( LCD smashed, but HDMI out AMD Phenom II quad core laptop ), a second hand Dell intel i5 . I don’t bother with 4K, I normally use 1080, 720 or DVD. I use a simple USB to 2.5 HDD case,… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

@Jeroen Sure, this will also be my first test once we have mainline Linux running on this board and looked into appropriate settings and software support (cpufreq/DVFS, IRQ affinity, PCIe driver support/quirks and so on). Some numbers for the rather popular Marvell 88SE9215 4-port SATA controller (single lane PCIe 2.x interface) can be found here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/4845-marvell-based-4-ports-mpci-sata-30/ It’s important to read the text too since the numbers were generated with setups that aren’t comparable (eg. ext4 vs. btrfs and this with various RAID modes). At least it’s obvious that the rather outdated i.MX6 has not the fastest PCIe 2.x implementation compared… Read more »

taki
taki
6 years ago

H6 support ts interface (DVB) but any devboard has pinout. Why any company add ts interface. I think good options alwinner h6 for dvb but need onbord tuner

subzero
subzero
6 years ago

@taki
Do you have Ts pinout for the pine H64 ?…”tuner” itself is no really problem,you can use ready can tuners like from serit .Add some components to power and control it,ready!….for the chips inside(tuner and demod)Stm linux driver are available …https://wiki.batc.org.uk/Serit_tuner

taki
taki
6 years ago

I dont know board pinout but H64 has look h64 pdf

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

The H6 with single threaded workloads can really clock with 1.8 GHz, confirmed by running the OpenSSL speedtest which also confirms existence of ARMv8 crypto extensions. The following is the ‘8192 bytes’ score comparing 3 different Cortex-A53 that run at different CPU clockspeeds: Marvell Armada 3720 at 1.0 GHz, Rockchip RK3328 @ 1296 MHz and Allwinner H6 at 1.8 GHz: type 3720 RK3328 H6 aes-128-cbc 741862.06k 975929.34k 1355754.15k aes-192-cbc 559303.34k 733563.56k 1018743.47k aes-256-cbc 462012.42k 605145.77k 840750.42k 1234 type                 3720        RK3328        H6aes-128-cbc       741862.06k   975929.34k  1355754.15kaes-192-cbc       559303.34k   733563.56k  1018743.47kaes-256-cbc       462012.42k   605145.77k   840750.42k The numbers scale linearly with CPU clockspeed so H6 at least when only one… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

Tinymembench numbers made on Orange Pi One Plus with old 3.10 BSP (libdram also from this version): https://pastebin.com/ubszDSUH (so most probably not comparable with PineH64 since different memory configuration. On a related note: few hours ago linux-sunxi devs got already rid off libdram, H6 can now initialize DRAM and boot BLOB free) And this ‘7z b’ result for Orange Pi One Plus: 7-Zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs) RAM size: 978 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 4 RAM usage: 850 MB, # Benchmark threads: 4 Dict Compressing | Decompressing Speed Usage R/U Rating… Read more »

mdel
mdel
6 years ago

tkaiser : The H6 with single threaded workloads can really clock with 1.8 GHz, confirmed by running the OpenSSL speedtest which also confirms existence of ARMv8 crypto extensions. Nice openssl performance. i was not expecting such an improvement over the rk3328, as you said if it scales with the cpu clock speed.. That also makes me wonder how the crypto block clocks are set, is it a fraction of the “runtime” main clock ? i thought it was a fixed clock, anyways the more the better.. tkaiser : I doubt you’ll ever want to connect ‘PCIe storage’ to H6 since… Read more »

willy
willy
6 years ago

tkaiser : Since memory bandwidth/throughput also has an influence it’s not possible to use 7-zip scores to determine CPU clockspeeds (useful to eg. verify that Amlogic is still cheating on us) but at least these numbers serve as a proof that H6 can exceed 1.5Ghz easily also with multi-threaded workloads and the 1488 MHz we saw here and there as maximum cpufreq have no meaning. It’s a 1.8 GHz SoC and to my knowledge currently the fastest Cortex-A53 around… Thomas, you seem to be commonly facing the problem of accurately determining the CPU frequency. When I started to work on… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

willy : Thomas, you seem to be commonly facing the problem of accurately determining the CPU frequency. Not really since I’m able to accept the thermal constraints most of those devices suffer from (in other words: to get top performance you do not need to look at maximum clockspeeds but at the amount of heat generated and the consumption and start there). My interest here started due to some vendors cheating. You mentioned Amlogic already but the other negative example are the RPi people. The vast majority of RPi 3 users does not even know they’re running frequency capped with… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

mdel : Nice openssl performance. i was not expecting such an improvement over the rk3328, as you said if it scales with the cpu clock speed. That’s what the single-threaded openssl benchmark is telling (and that’s how we can use this benchmark to check for real clockspeeds but @willy‘s tool seems to be the better choice for stuff like this). What happens in real world scenarios when the CPU cores are busy in parallel or more than one thread is running… needs more testing. Wrt LTE modems: all I know are USB anyway using pins 36/38 of the mPCIe connector.… Read more »

willy
willy
6 years ago

tkaiser : Thanks for your tool, will give it a try in the hope I’m able to spot such behaviour easily (eg. S912 lowering CPU clockspeeds to 1200 MHz when more than 3 CPU cores are busy). BTW, the current version runs a single thread. I didn’t have the courage to implement a full cpu mapping configuration for multi-threading. Instead I’m running it with “taskset -c”, several instances at a time in the background and that’s often enough. This is already pretty visible on my upboard, which goes down from 1920 MHz to 1680 when more than 2 cores are… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

mdel : i don’t know what’s more stable / fast, usb3-sata or pcie-sata controllers On platforms with mature driver support wrt sequential transfer speeds there’s not much difference between a good and UASP capable USB3-SATA controller and a PCIe attached SATA controller if limited to a single PCIe 2.x lane: gets close to 400 MB/s. But usually this is only achievable with SSDs and then you also want to benefit from high random IO performance / IOPS. Here we see PCIe attached controllers outperforming USB3 easily. But it’s always also a matter of drivers and yet no one knows how… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
6 years ago

@willy
On behalf of James who again helped with testing: pastebin.com/p9CdLVuk

Your mhz tool running on an Orange Pi One Plus correctly reporting H6 clocking at 1.8GHz… and that also when all 4 CPU cores are busy at the same time.

blu
blu
6 years ago

@willy
Nice tool!

Not that it would make much of a difference in practice, but in case you want to also drop the locals initialization overhead from loop50 and loop250, here’s a patch: https://pastebin.com/7U9Zcf9f

willy
willy
5 years ago

Hi blue! Thank you, sorry for the delay, I didn’t notice your message. I’ll give this a try, but I suspect it will be slightly more accurate on inefficient processors where the 0 initialization is not negligible.

blu
blu
5 years ago

@willy
Absolutely np, I often miss replies on cnx myself. Just to let you know, your tool has come in handy to me repeatedly. Coincidentally, it’s very useful for measuring variances in VM speeds on cloud providers ; )

Khadas VIM4 SBC