Allwinner H616 (sun50iw9p1) is a SoC that features a Quad-Core Cortex-A53 ARM CPU, and a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU from ARM. The H618 is a minor update with a larger (1MB) L2 cache. The H313 is another variant targeted to low-end TV boxes. The T507 uses the same die, but routes out additional pins, to expose LCD and camera functionality. The H700 is yet another package variant, exposing the RGB LCD pins, and reportedly the NMI pin.

There seem to be at least two different die revisions, which use a different CPUX_CFG IP block. See below for more details.

Overview

H616
Manufacturer	Allwinner
Process	28nm
CPU	Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53
Memory	up to 4 GB DDR4 / DDR3 / DDR3L / LPDDR3 / LPDDR4
GPU	Mali-G31 MP2
Connectivity
Video	HDMI 2.0a up to 4K @ 60Hz; CVBS with PAL or NTSC
Audio	I2S, S/PDIF, HDMI audio
Network	1x 10/100M MAC with PHY; 1x GBit MAC with RGMII
Storage	MMC, NAND
USB	USB2.0: 1x OTG + 3x Host
Other	IOMMU, 3x SDIO, 2x SPI,; 6x UART, 6x I2C, 4x PWM,; TFBGA284, 0.65mm pitch, 0.35mm ball size, 14x12mm
Website	Product Page

H616 is targeted towards TV boxes and SBCs with the Mali-G31, better video encoding/decoding hardware and more efficient power consumption.^[1]

Compared to the H6 SoC, it lacks USB 3.0 and PCIe, but adds a second Ethernet interface (100Mbit/s only). Apparently it has no CPUS (ARISC management processor) anymore, also is missing the associated SRAM A2.

The memory map extends beyond 4GB, to accommodate a full 4GB of DRAM. However the DMA controller in the EMAC network device still only contain 32 bits worth of a physical memory address, which prevents DMA buffers to be located beyond 3GB. This is not a problem, because the Ethernet driver knows about this and will ask the kernel for the DMA buffers to be located within the first 4GB of physical address space only. The MMC controller has been somewhat hacked to support up to 15 GB of DRAM, so SD card or eMMC DMA can use the whole DRAM as a target.

die revisions

The VER_REG register at address 0x3000024 encodes the die revision in its lowest 8 bits. The BSP code differentiates between 0x00 and 0x02.

The older, original die revision 0 has the CPUX_CFG IP block as documented in the H616 user manual, located at address 0x09010000.
Chips with die revision 2 have a different IP block providing that same functionality, at address 0x08100000.

This IP block is relevant to U-Boot and Trusted Firmware only, and is detected and handled there automatically in later releases. The kernel itself is not affected by this change.

Most chips labelled H616 seem to ship in die revision 0, although there have been reports of both H616 and H313 chips in die revision 2 as well. The T507 also ships in both die revisions. All H618 chips so far seem to be die revision 2. It is yet unconfirmed, but likely that the die revision also corresponds to the L2 cache size change (512KB for revision 0, 1MB for revision 2).

Documentation

Mainline Support

U-Boot and Trusted-Firmware-A support have been merged into the official repositories, please use the latest master branch and refer to the respective documentation for building the firmware.

Basic Linux support is mainline since v6.0, the essential pinctrl and clock drivers were merged already into v5.12.

The Xunlong Orange Pi Zero2 was used as the primary bringup device.

The H618 is fully compatible from a kernel point of view, but does require extra support in U-Boot, TF-A and sunxi-fel. Support for that has been merged in mainline releases.

missing Linux kernel driver support

thermal support: merged into v6.9-rc1
CPUfreq support: merged into v6.10-rc1
audio support: analogue: v1 on the list, HDMI: depends on audio hub support
DRM graphics: v5 on the list
Mali 3D: should work with Panfrost, but needs (simple) power domain driver to toggle one bit
integrated Ethernet PHY: patches exist in Jernej's github, but need some work to be upstreamed
~~crypto~~: merged into v6.11-rc1
PWM: related to WIP D1/T113 PWM drivers, but need some extra code for changed registers
video engine: patches exist somewhere?