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.

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.

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 functionality point of view, so doesn't need specific software support.