The Allwinner A64 sports four Cortex-A53 cores and supports a range of memory and storage standards. The company has not revealed the full spec, but it went out of its way to mention support for “various DDR memory” types, making the Bill of Material (BOM) more competitive.

The chip also supports eMMC 5.0 for improved IO performance and higher storage speeds. The chip was designed with Android 5.0 in mind, with the latest 3.10 Linux kernel.

The GPU remains a mystery, since Allwinner did not disclose the vendor, let alone the any specific information. In the past Allwinner used ARM Mali-T400MP2 and PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPUs on its most prolific Allwinner 3x series SoCs. However, the company made it clear that the Allwinner A64 supports features a GPU with hardware H.265/H.264 video decoding, and support for HDMI 4K displays.

The Allwinner A64 is hardly an impressive piece of silicon in terms of sheer specs, but the fact that it’s possible to design, produce and market a multi-core 64-bit chip capable of pushing 4K displays for just $5 is truly impressive feat. Maybe we’re just getting old, since we can remember huge graphics cards that struggled with 1024x768 in glorious 8-bit colour? [Nick can also remember when Nero burned Rome on a bet, after a three-day wine and oyster binge. Ed]