Huawei, Google, ARM, among others, have collaborated to launch a new single-board development computer similar to the Raspberry Pi, except it's a super-powered alternative that is priced at $239 (roughly Rs.) – to put that in perspective, the Raspberry Pi 3 costs $35[1]. Called the HiKey 960, it's a 96Boards development platform that will go on sale in the US, EU, and Japan in early May.
The HiKey 960 is powered by an octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 960 SoC with four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz, and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz, coupled with a Mali-G71 MP8 GPU that';s capable of 4K graphics, and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM. It sports 32GB of UFS 2.1 flash storage and a microSD card slot.
For connectivity, the HiKey 960 has a HDMI 1.2a port (full-HD), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac (dual-band), Bluetooth v4.1, two USB3.0 Type-A ports, one USB2.0 Type-C OTG port, and a PCIe m.2 connector. It also has two expansion connectors (40-pin and 60-pin) for camera modules to be attached to the board.
Also on board the HiKey 960 are LEDs for Wi-Fi & Bluetooth, four user LEDs, and a power button. It measures in at 85x55mm.
The HiKey 960 board was launched by Huawei[2], a core member of Linaro - an open source collaborative engineering organisation developing software for the ARM ecosystem - and its 96Boards initiative. Other members that contributed to the development of the platform are ARM[3], Google[4], Archermind, and LeMaker.
The HiKey 960 is officially supported as an Android reference board. Linaro in a statement said[5], "Initial software support for the board is provided in the AOSP source tree based on the Android Common...