Talk:Allwinner Technology

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Historical Licencing

"In 2011, Allwinner Technology became the ARM processor licencee" - must have been sooner (2007) because of F-series?

yes, the article now reads as if before 2011 Allwinner used its own CPU design instead of ARM's, while that is not the case at all! Was the earlier use of the ARM IP done illegally? Mahjongg (talk) 11:46, 31 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just speculation, but as they're a fabless semiconductor company they could have had their manufacturing done for them in an ARM licenced foundry. There's a few explanations that don't require illegality so barring any citable claims of illegality we should assume that they had legitimate access to the design & patents. Kiore (talk) 10:34, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

R16&Nintendo

In this article there is never talked about the implementation of the chip by Nintendo in the Nes Classic, Snes Classic and Nes Classic 2018 model which is a big thing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kevincrans (talk • contribs) 18:11, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Use

Ainol Novo 9 Spark (aka Firewire) have the A31 cpu inside, no th A31s. See here his disassebmling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG7BjYR5Y7I But maybe TabletPCs with the old name "Firewire" have A31s, I don't know.

CedarX

What about documentation for CedarX, or libraries or kernel modules or patches for the Linux kernel? ScotXW (talk) 18:46, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"The main disadvantages with CedarX technology and associated libraries is that Allwinner's own CedarX proprietary libraries have no clear usage license, so even if the source code for some versions is available the terms-of-use is unknown in open source software, and there is no glue code for any other multimedia frameworks on GNU/Linux systems that could be used as a middle-ware, like for example OpenMAX or VAAPI." - there now is a reverse engineered driver available. 81.129.202.145 (talk) 04:18, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Merge articles

May we suggest merging the Allwinner articles into an all-encompassing one. We have a separate page for A1x family: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_A1X . Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.120.173.56 (talk) 03:46, 22 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

ARM big.LITTLE

As the ARM big.LITTLE article documents, there is In-kernel switcher (CPU migration) and Heterogeneous multi-processing (global task scheduling) (GTS). Which approach is implemented in the A80? User:ScotXW^t@lk 23:59, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Recent edit violates principle of neutrality, and makes article read more like an advertisement

In revision https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allwinner_Technology&oldid=619399006 dated 1 August 2014, user Myusernameisshort removed referenced tablet chip market share information that I recently added to the article. In particular, this user removed information about Allwinner losing its number of unit shipment position in the Chinese tablet chip market to Rockchip in Q4 2013 and further dropping to #3 in Q2 2014. This is relevant information about the company. I believe the removal of this information does not conform with the objectivity and neutrality expected from a Wikipedia article. Indeed, it is edits such as this one that cause the "This article appears to be written like an advertisement." tag to continue to be present above the article, and for good reasons.

User Myusernameisshort also added the sentence: Allwinner positioned A33 for entry-level tablets, which will be massively used in quad-core tablets priced from $30 to $60. ^[1]

I think it is premature misleading to state that the A33 will be "massively" used in quad-core tablets. The reference only establishes that A33 has entered mass production. How many tablets actually adopt the chip still has to be seen. It is nonsensical to link the "mass production" of a chip to a chip being "massively used" by manufacturers. Again I believe this violates the neutrality required in a Wikipedia article.

I have added back the recent market share information from DigiTimes, while preserving and fixing a link for the market share information that Myusernameisshort added for the whole year 2013 (although direct information for the whole year 2013 is not yet referenced). Calamites (talk) 14:28, 1 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In revision https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allwinner_Technology&oldid=641029439 dated 5 January 2015, the section with recent market share information was again deleted without reason, this time by user User:Datoudatou. This is again violates the principle of neutrality. I will add back the relevant section to the article. Calamites (talk) 17:12, 5 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ aid=407 "Allwinner A33, World's First $4 Quad Core Tablet Processor, Now in Mass Production". Retrieved July, 2014. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)

GPL violations

I do not get this. What does it take to get that information accepted? What more does this take than a concise list of actual violations on some website? When is this sort of information NOT provided by some user. Does my factual investigation as a well known open source developer, GPU liberator, and one of the central community members of the very well established SoC project surrounding this processor family not good enough? And why are these reverting edits happening from an IP address and not by a wikipedia user which can be approached directly and can be held accountable for his/her actions? --libv — Preceding unsigned comment added by Libv (talk • contribs) 08:44, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:RS and WP:V. You are effectively the primary source of that information and the publication amounts to being self published. As far as I can tell you are not recognised as a legal authority on copyright matters, despite how fantastic you think you are in other ways. There is no reason to see that what is being said is fact checked, a correct legal position etc. I'd note from your colleagues comments on the mailing list you last linked, you might want to read WP:SOAPBOX andWP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. FWIW I would tend to believe you that AllWinner aren't fulfilling there end of the GPL, but since I too am no recognised authority on the matter, haven't done all the background research (dual licensing, extent to which license exceptions apply etc.).

As an example of what is not clear, it has been said that much of the source has been made available by device manufacturers. Under section 3(a) of the GPL 2 "Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code...". Since I've not had AllWinner distribute code directly to me, but have had device manufacturers. If AllWinner provide their partners the source in compliance with 3(a) then they are good (they have no further obligation than that), it is the device manufacturers who have the obligation for the further distribution and it may be their failing that it's not being distributed rather than all winner direct. I don't know if that is the case or not, but I've seen no evidence to confirm or deny it either. --86.2.216.5 (talk) 20:18, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I sadly am the only current source for this since I usually end up being the one guy who has done the legwork (cfr. rpi gpu). I also have so far refrained from getting popular coverage on this, which is very very easily done, but that would make this discussion more sensationalist and less factual. But understood, I am sure that someone else will at some point in future revisit this, by which time the interweb will have taken some of the facts out of the discussion, and added a whole lot of noise. Libv (talk) 03:45, 31 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

—Hobart (talk) 16:54, 26 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Malicious campaign against Allwinner

Libv is staging a malicious campaign against Allwinner:

The claim that the CedarX library has been obfuscated is bogus. Previous versions of the closed-source library had debugging information while the newer version had that information stripped (Strip_(Unix). It is common practice in the industry to strip the closed-source binaries before distributing. Allwinner engineers omitted the stripping of the older version.

The reference to phoronix.com (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Allwinner-Obfuscating-Code) is of low-quality. The article does not make any assessment of the validity of the source and simply reiterates what has been written on the Google Groups e-mail. Libv contacted Phoronix in order to write the article. There are currently no other primary sources other than Libv.

Posts by libv to linux-sunxi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Simosx (talk • contribs) 11:08, 9 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello again Mr Shill. Your statement there is quite untrue (again). We actually caught Allwinner renaming their symbols _after_ we were able to point out that it was Allwinner and Allwinner alone that was responsible for the (L)GPL violations. The stripping happened as a third iteration in this silly game. This is my email when catching them redhanded: [1], dated 2015-02-25. This is the thread when we noticed them renaming symbols [2], dated 2015-03-19. And here is their third attempt, by stripping the binaries (but leaving the actual code unchanged): [3] dated 2015-03-25. The chronology of this is pretty telling, and I do not understand how you can honestly try to claim what you do claim above. Plus, everyone is free to go and download the referenced binary blobs and verify, for himself, that my statements are true, all relevant information is provided. Libv (talk) 13:34, 5 Sep 2016 (UTC)

IDH?

The article uses the acronym "IDH" a few times without ever explaining/expanding it. I suspect that this acronym is unknown to most people who do not avidly follow this field. I don't recognize it. 172.58.136.246 (talk) 20:08, 26 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Chip quality and criticism of this CPU

Is there any discussions to reference (or put in this talk section) about the chip quality, errors, integrity, vs other more expensive chips? At the price, there must be some drawbacks about this chip and the small computers that use this chip. Memory issues, CPU issues, would be an interesting reference or talk discussion

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[1] =407 "Allwinner A33, World's First $4 Quad Core Tablet Processor, Now in Mass Production". Retrieved July, 2014. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)

[1]