Allwinner R818 SoC is made for smart speakers with a screen

We’ve previously covered several Allwinner R-Series processors designed for smart speakers such as Allwinner R328 and R329 dual-core Cortex-A53 processors with the latter include a small AI accelerator from Arm China.

But the Chinese company has recently a new more powerful quad-core processor with Allwinner R818 suitable for smart speakers with a screen, also called “smart displays”.

Allwinner R818 specifications:

CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.6 GHz with 32KB L1 I-cache + 32KB L1 D-cache per core, 512KB L2 cache, and CoolFlex power management architecture
GPU – Imagination PowerVR GE8300 with support for OpenGL ES3.2, Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 1.2
Memory I/F – DDR3/DDR3L/DDR4/LPDDR3/LPDDR4, 32-bit width, up to 4GB
Storage I/F – eMMC 5.1, 8-bit parallel NAND Flash, SPI NAND flash
Video Unit
- H.265 video decoder 4K @ 30fps, H.264 video decoder 4K @ 30fps, VP9 video decoder 720p @ 30fps
- H.264 video encoder 1080p @ 60fps
- MJPEG/JPEG Baseline encoder 4K @ 15fps
Display
- MIPI-DSI interface, dual-link LVDS interface, RGB interface up to 1920 x 1200
- Allwinner SmartColor2.0 post-processing engine
Camera
- Dual MIPI-CSI @ 1.0Gbps, 4 lanes + 2 lanes
- 13M @ 10fps or 8M @ 30fps ISP with 3A/2D de-noise/defect pixel correction
- Dual camera 5M @ 25 fps + 2M @ 25 fps
Audio
- 2x DAC and 2x ADC
- LINE-OUT/MIC-IN/Stereo headphone
- 4x I2S, 8-channel DMIC, OWA OUT
USB – 1x USB Host, 1x USB OTG
Other Peripherals
- SDIO 3.0
- 3x SPI, 6x UART, 6x I2C/TWI, 5x PWM
- EMAC, GPADC, LRADC, CIR RX&TX
Package – LFBGA 346balls; 12 x 12 mm body size, 0.5 mm ball pitch, 0.3 mm ball size
Process – 28nm

If the specifications look similar it’s because Allwinner R818 is actually the same chip as Allwinner A133 tablet SoC. Those different processor names happen because of Allwinner structure with business units that take care of different customers, with for instance a Tablet business unit (A-series now merged in T-Series), and a “Smart Speaker/Smart Home” business unit (R-Series).

That also means an Android 10.0 SDK, and support for Allwinner wireless chips namely Allwinner XR829 802.11 b/g/n WiFI 4 & BT4.2, and Allwinner AW859A 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac WiFI 5 & BT 5.0. Allwinner designed an R818 evaluation board, but I cannot find it for sale anywhere yet. Besides Android support, another operating system called HybridOS is being developed partially based on Huawei HarmonyOS, more specifically OpenHarmony.

You may visit the product page, but usually, Allwinner does not provide many details beyond the hardware specs.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.