Tronsmart launches world's first octa-core media player, with 4GB RAM option

Tronsmart made the news at the end of August when it launched the Orion R28 and became one of the first companies to release a commercial available device with a Cortex-A17 processor. Now the company has gone one better and announced the world’s first Android based TV media player with an octa-core processor.

The Tronsmart Draco AW80 comes in two variants, a model with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, and its big brother, a model with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of flash. Both models use the new Allwinner A80 octa-core SoC. The A80 is a big.LITTLE processor with four Cortex-A15 cores and four Cortex-A7 cores. The AnTuTu scores are impressive at over 55,000.

For graphics the A80 SoC uses the Imagination PowerVR G6230 GPU. The G6230 contains two Unified Scalable Clusters (or USCs), with each cluster containing 16 pipelines. Each pipeline has 2 FP32 ALUs. This means that the PowerVR G6230 GPU has a total of 64 FP32 ALU cores.

This all means that the A80 can handle 1080p H.265 playback at 30 frames per second and 4K H.264 playback also at 30 fps. Since the device is designed to be used with a TV, the box also supports the use of Google’s TV remote app. For connectivity the device includes wired Ethernet support, 802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.0.

The Draco AW80 should also be a good choice for developers. Like the Orion R28, Tronsmarts new media player is fully open source. It ships with Android 4.4 and can be reprogrammed to run Linux. The first beta images for Linux are expected at the end of November.

Both models are being sold exclusively by Geekbuying. The 2GB/16GB model is already available for $149, while the 4G/32GB version is currently on pre-sale and is expected to ship around November 25th.

Although there are lots of different options around, like the Nexus Player, Chromecast, and Amazon Fire TV, this new device certainly looks to be a winner in terms of performance. What do you think, would you buy one?