Two new cheap media players your TV with Kobi and Android 5.1 that can even decode 4k H.264 4k 60fps clips. The new MX Plus & Sunvell T95 both these media players are powered by a 64bit AMlogic S905 chipset + Mali 450 GPU, it’s a quad core that clocks up to 2.0 Ghz. 1GB of DDR ram, Full sized HDMI and an 8GB Rom.
Not much storage I know, but they do have MicroSD card slots and 4 x USB 2.0 ports for expanding that storage. Both also have dual-band Wireless AC and gigabit LAN ports. So they should be ideal for streaming media.
The Sunvell T95 is $50.91 at GearBest and the MX Plus just $45.20, so not a bad price for a media box that can decode 4k videos.
The Sunvell T95
Jonathan
I think you get almost twice as many registers in AArch64 too, which on paper should give a significant performance boost because there’s less need to save/restore working variables.
The disappointing thing about Linux on these ARM systems is the lack of Mali support and hardware accelerated video encoding/decoding. Also in time you tend to get multiple variants of these type of boxes that all wire up the hardware in different ways so you never know if you’ll be able to get a fully working Linux version for a device until you get it and examine the insides.
Elvis
Why bother with 64 bit to address one gig of ram?
BBaker
In general you are correct. It’s not needed. It is possible that some types of applications could run faster on 64bit due to the increased size of processor registers, but you’d be unlikely to run such software on a meager system like this. With only 1 Gig of RAM a 64bit OS actually is a disadvantage because it takes up more disk space and memory once loaded. I think I’d rather have a 32bit OS on a low resource 1GB/8GB device.
Btw, I read that there are some Linux versions that run on some of these AMlogic S905 boxes. Running Kodi on top could work well as an alternative to Android.