We didn’t use an S912. There are a couple of problems with this chip:
- Task scheduling is broken, which means that threads are often placed on the little cores. This makes it slower than S905 devices under a series of workloads
- Mali userspace libraries are not licensed for Linux. Kodi on Linux for S912 uses an Android driver and a libhybris wrapper which causes some issues. Kodi v19 will use V4L2/GBM, so this workaround would not be possible. It wouldn’t make sense for us to launch a new product with a shorter lifespan than our former product.
Gigabit Ethernet is added by muxing an external PHY with the internal PHY pins. This gives us about 940Mbps (TX and RX) in real world. The Ethernet isn’t connected via USB, so there are no bottlenecks there.
We have no plans for this. The implementation is cost prohibitive and USB 2.0 is good enough.
It’s about three times faster based on random read/write benchmarks.
Cheers
Sam