ATV520E - preamble to a review

This old device is circa 2014 and it cost me $31 including shipping.

Specifications, the ATV520E has an ARM Cortex A9 Dual core CPU with a MALI-400 MP2. It has 1GB RAM with 4GB of NAND flash memory and this is running Android 4.2.2 API Level 17. 2393.70 BogoMips.

The CPU is identified as an ARMv7 Processor.

The internet can of course be used to establish what some of that means, but I will expand, for my own education, on a little of the above, and in addition, hopefully prevent any readers of the blog from falling asleep.

It confused me years back, this designation of the CPU in different ways, but I found it best just to allow the confusion to continue. An ARM Cortex A9 is an ARMv7-A 32 bit architecture, the Cortex A9 was touted, back in the day, to offer 25% more performance than the Cortex A8. In the advent of many of our computer devices becoming mainstream appliances, the names of the processors are becoming redundant, at the end of the day, if it is a toaster, does it make toast?

The MALI-400 MP2 is a dual core graphics chip, or GPU and again, it is part of the SoC of this unit and although this Android box harks back to 2014 the ARM A9 and ARM MALI-400 are longer in the tooth by about five years.

API Level is an integer value that uniquely identifies the framework API revision offered by a version of the Android platform. The Android platform provides a framework API that applications can use to interact with the underlying Android system. The framework API consists of a core set of packages and classes. In simple terms, if an application (or app) requires an API level less than or equal to 17 then it will run, if the requirement is higher, then more than likely, or perhaps definitely, it will not.

I will explain how that may become a problem in the next post.

Wikipedia gave me a giggle when I looked up BogoMips (from "bogus" and MIPS) as an unscientific measurement of CPU speed made by the Linux kernel when it boots to calibrate an internal busy-loop. An often-quoted definition of the term is "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing" which sounds a little of what my brain is all about in my advanced years.

Yes, it was a paltry $31 including shipping, and the internal memory is a less than spectacular one gigabyte.  In addition, there is a scant four gigabytes of some sort of storage memory and a more than obsolete version of the Android operating system and API, the question is, will any of that become an issue for my intended use of this vintage box?

We will see.