Sherlock

A little more about this topic regarding Android boxes and their mysterious ARM processors.

I want to establish what processor is in the MyGica ATV520E box, that sounds like a simple thing to do, as I have one right here, so I will put my detective cap on and start.

The box runs Android 4.2.2 and I went into settings, clicked on "about device" and nothing on that screen indicated what processor was running, although there may be clues that sail right over my head. It tells me that the model number is "MBX reference board (stvmx)" and if I search online I score a result from Geekbench that the processor for that is (perhaps) an ARM Amlogic @ 1.51 GHz with 1 processor and 2 cores. Another search hit from Passmark gives me information on a Geniatech MBX reference board (stvmx) running an ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l) with 2 cores and an average passmark rating of 1367.

An application I installed, called Kodi, version 16.1 which is "Jarvis" has a system information screen and under hardware it confirms that it is an ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l) running at that dubious benchmark of 2393.70 BogoMips.

I now understand from previous enquiries that ARMv7 is an architecture, but what processor is installed? - the online specifications for the ATV520E say that it is an ARM Cortex A9 Dual core CPU but the internet is full of fake news and I would like to confirm the facts somehow from my own investigations.

I installed AnTuTu benchmark and put the old box through the various tests, I'm not going to detail the performance results in this post, just the processor information it provided.

The program reported that it is an ARM Cortex-A9 and to be more exact, a 32 bit Amlogic AML8726-MX with 2 cores with running speed from 96~1512 MHz and it was currently running at 1200 MHz.

Progress!

The next step was to search online for the Amlogic AML8726-MX and I established that it supports the ARMv7 architecture, it's primary CPU is a 32 bit dual ARM Cortex-A9 with Harvard Superscalar processor cores and it is a RISC design. The GPU on the SoC is a 400 MHz dual ARM Mali-400MP2 dual core and in addition, the SoC has a Dual ARM Neon SIMD Engine for Digital Signal Processing. The 40nm build supports HDMI, USB 2.0, DDR3 RAM and is reported to be capable of decoding video at 1080P at 30 FPS.

It was with a sense of accomplishment that I considered the investigation closed.

That's what is inside the old ATV520E toaster, the question now is, does it still make toast?