Ingenic X1830 IoT Processor Features a 32-bit MIPS Core, 128MB DDR2 RAM

Ingenic is a silicon vendor based in Beijing, China and known for its MIPS Xburst processors such as JZ4780 dual-core SoC or T10 video processor.

It’s been a while (a few years) since we last covered new processors from the company, but it appears the company launched another MIPS SoC for IoT applications last year. Meet Ingenic X1830 processor.

Ingenic X1830 IoT Application Processor
Click to Enlarge

X1830 specifications:

  • CPU – MIPS32 XBurst-1 core @ up to 1.5 GHz with SIMD engine, 32KB instruction cache, 32KB data cache, 128KB unified L2 cache
  • Memory – 128MB DDR2 in package
  • Storage I/F – 2x SD/eMMC controllers, and Quad SPI (QSPI)
  • VPU
    • H264 Encoder up to 1080p80 or 1560×1600 resolution
    • JPEG compressing/decompressing up to 70Mega-pixels per second
  • ISP
    • 12-bit RAW or up to 24-bit RGB
    • Max input resolution 2688×2048 @20fps, 1080p @60fps,720p @120fps
    • 2-D and 3-D noise reduction filter, advanced demosaic, color processing, lens shading, defog, glare, static/dynamic defect pixel…
  • Image post-processor (IPU)
    • Data format
      • Input – ARGB,RGB,NV12/NV21
      • Output – ARGB,RGB,NV12/NV21,HSV
    • Support 4 layers OSD
  • Display (LCD) – Up to 640×480 @ 60 Hz – TFT (RGB666) or SLCD support
  • Video input – Support DVP/BT1120, 2-lane MIPI CSI2, LVDS
  • Audio
    • Integrated 24-bit DAC with 93dB SNR and  24-bit ADC with 92dB SNR;  Sampling rate up to 96Kpbs
    • I2S and DMIC interfaces
  • Other Peripherals
    • 10/100M Ethernet
    • USB 2.0 OTG interface
    • 32x independent DMA channels
    • Various clocks and timers
    • 3x 10-bit ADC input up to 2 Msps
    • RTC (Real Time Clock)
    • General-Purpose I/O ports
    • 3x I2C, 2x SPI, 2x UART
  • Security – Digital True Random Number Generator(DTRNG), 1024-bit OTP, AES256 encryption
  • Supply Voltages
    • General-purpose I/O – 1.5 ~ 3.6V
    • DDR I/O for DDR2 – 1.8V ± 0.1V
    • RTC I/O – 1.5V~3.6V
    • EFUSE programming – 1.5V ± 10%
    • Analog power supply 1 – 1.8V ± 10%
    • Analog power supply 2 – 3.3V ± 10%
    • Core supply – 1.3V ± 0.1V
  • Package – BGA223 11 x 11 x 1.22mm, 0.65mm pitch
  • Process – 28mm CMOS low power

There’s actually little public information about the processor, and it’s not even on Ingenic website. I found out about it when I was sent a link to the datasheet released in March 2019.

GDK-350H X1830 Linux Game Console
GDK-350H Linux Game Console

There aren’t any publicly available details about software or development board, but at least one product is now selling with the processor: GKD 350H (aka GameKiddy RG350 H) portable retro game console with a 3.5 ” 320×240 IPS display and running Linux.  You’ll find it on Aliexpress for about $70 plus shipping, and a community has shared custom firmware for the console.

We can also see several references to X1830 in the Linux kernel mailing list, and some developers ported AWTK graphical toolkit to the latest Ingenic processor as well.

Thanks to Alexander for the tip.

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12 Comments
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willy
willy
4 years ago

Strangely, in parallel OpenWRT 19.07’s changelog mentions dropping the support for the “unmaintained XBurst platform”. So maybe they just reloaded an old forgotten processor family ?

sydarn2
sydarn2
4 years ago

What do you mean by “reloaded an old forgotten processor family”?

Actually there is ongoing work to homogenize and increase hardware support of ingenic’s socs. If you don’t want to lurk on the kernel mailing lists Michael Larabel wrote about it for 5.3 release here:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.3-DRM-Ingenic-Rockchip

Also Jean-Luc covered significant progress on ingenic’s socs in release 5.4 here:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/11/25/linux-5-4-release-main-changes-arm-mips-risc-v-architectures/

willy
willy
4 years ago

Thanks for the links! Unfortunately I don’t know the myriad of confusing variants of the MIPS architecture. I just know I have several of them which are mutually incompatible and I don’t even know if it’s just a matter of ABI, ISA, extensions or even more than that. When I saw this “XBurst” prominently shown on the diagram while it appears in OpenWRT’s changelog in the middle of other obsolete targets that were dropped like au1000 or ppc40x, my conclusion not knowing this particular one is that it’s among the “old” ones that are dropped from OpenWRT because not used… Read more »

Willy
Willy
4 years ago

Maybe indeed.

Diego
Diego
4 years ago

Possibly a target for retrobsd?

naraic
naraic
4 years ago

nah, that targets microcontrollers. this is more of a CPU.

sydarn2
sydarn2
4 years ago

It already runs Linux. The manufacturer of the this handheld (gkd350h) has ported openDingux [1]. openDingux was originally developed for the gcwZero with jz4770. Differences that I know of between the jz4770 and the x1830 is that x1830 doesn’t have any 3d-accelerator (and hence rely on software rendering) and a different IPU. Unfortunately the gkd350h manufacturer didn’t implement support for the new IPU, so it instead relies on software scaling of the emulated systems to fit the display. Luckily the x1830 has a lot of more processing power than the jz4770. You can even overclock it to 1.9GHz without noticeable… Read more »

Arnd Bergmann
Arnd Bergmann
4 years ago

There is a kernel tree at http://git.ingenic.com.cn:8082/gerrit/kernel/kernel-3.10 that supports this SoC along with 4775, 4780, m200, x1000, x1520, x1630 and x1830. There are also references to a 4.4.93 kernel but I couldn’t find that one, maybe they abandoned the port to later kernels again. It also appears that all X1xxx and Tx0 chips are closely related, with mostly incremental changes to the video encoder unit for use in cameras, the CPU clock frequency and the amount of integrated RAM. It’s going to be interesting if they ever come out with the X2000 chip, which is said to be based on… Read more »

willy
willy
4 years ago

Apparently it was not expected to be public, it says 404 now. And well, 3.10 was EOLed quite a few years ago now. I hope at least they are not maintaining their own!

sydarn2
sydarn2
4 years ago

Could it be that this snapshot on their ftp server is the same, even though its not advertised as that?
ftp://198.13.102.99/ingenic_support/X1000_X1000E_X1500/01_SW/00_Board-Level_Consolidation_Version/Kernel3.10.14_X1000_New_Version/08_ingenic-linux-kernel3.10.14-x1000-v9.0-20191212/ingenic-linux-kernel3.10.14-x1000-v9.0-20191212.tar.bz2

Also here is the programming manual:
https://jz47xx.github.io/manuals/X1830_pm.pdf

As a sidenote, it would seem that it doesn’t support hw scaling, despite what I wrote above to Diego.

Willy
Willy
4 years ago

3.10.14 ? Seriously ? This is criminal. It was already missing 5700 fixes two years ago when 3.10 was EOLed. Since then we’ve had thousands more and hundreds of new vulnerabilities. There are probably around 1000 unfixed important security issues and 8-10000 unfixed bugs in this kernel. In short there is zero chance of stability on this thing. Guys, please don’t touch that, it’s worse than radioactive waste!

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