The PX5 processor is a common high performance processor found in many android headunits.
PX5 Processor Answers
Yes. The PX5 is a modern design, fast processor for android headunits
Yes. The PX5 is a good choice for an android headunit. While the PX5 is recently very popular the newer models use the upgraded PX6 processor.
Yes. The PX5 android headunits have 4Gb RAM.
No. The PX5 is an octacore processor. This is a processor with 8 ARM cores.
Yes you can still find the PX5 based android headunits. These PX5 tend to be old stock. Most models that employed the PX5 are now using the upgraded PX6 processor instead.
Purposeful Design
The PX5 processor is notable for is design purpose. The PX5 was destined for the android headunits. Unlike the many processors used previously to power the head units that were designed for phones, this one is special. By only building in features that an android headunit would benefit from and excluding all the phone specific features savings can be made.
Cut out the fat
A typical android headunit processor previously relied in using chips designed for phones. Security with finger print detection, megapixel camera support, A.I. for filters and many other phone specific details are not need in an android head unit. Not including these supports in a processor core can reduce the size, and therefore reduce the cost or the same size die can be used for more cores and co-processors.
The PX5 design statement
PX5 is a low power, high performance processor for in-vehicle infotainment system. It supports
rockchip.com
Android, based on the ARM Cortex architecture.
This is encouraging. To see the time and money put into producing a new processor that is designed for use in an android headunit is what the market has been crying out for. Gone is the need to re-purpose the phone specific processors, with their design features at odd with the android headunits. The Chinese manufacturers can build headunits with a dedicated processor for the job.
Octa Core
The Octa Core setup is made up of 8 ARM Cortex-A53 cores. There are 2 clusters evenly split into 4 cores each. The first cluster are is in the high-performance(big cluster) and the other is optimised for low power(little cluster). An interesting 1:1 split of the clusters.
PX5 Processor block diagram
NEON coprocessor
The PX5 octa-cores include the ARM NEON FPU/Co-processors as seen in the block diagram. The ARM NEON SIMD technology employed in the PX5 design is used to improve the multimedia user experience. This performance boost is brought by accelerating audio and video encoding/decoding, user interface, 2D/3D graphics, and gaming apps. All ideal features for speed boosting in an android headunit.
PX5 GHz
The PX5 processor is clocked at 1.5Ghz. This is a respectable clock rate for and 8 core Cortex-A53 processor.
Support for RAM
The PX5 supports up to 2 ranks (chip selects) giving a total of 4GB maximum address space.
This means the maximum RAM a PX5 powered android head unit is 4Gb.
4G RAM is a respectable amount. With the PX5 being capable of addressing the common DDR3-1066 RAM it will help keep apps moving quickly, while keeping costs low. There is faster RAM available, but this processor is targeted at a competitive and cost focused market. The market needs cheap to produce, high performance components. Using 4Gb DDR3 1066 will keep the cost down but give a good performance boost over the earlier designs.
USB Support
You can’t get anywhere without USB ports. Every android head unit has them, needs them. The most universal connection for the widest range of add-ons for an android head unit is by USB. The PX5 has USB2 and USB2OTG support. No USB3 just yet for the Android Headunits.
USB Host2.0
Embedded 2 USB Host2.0 interfaces
Compatible with USB Host2.0 specification
Supports high-speed(480Mbps), full-speed(12Mbps) and low-speed (1.5Mbps) mode
Provides 16 host mode channels
Support periodic out channel in host mode
USB OTG2.0
Compatible with USB OTG2.0 specification
Supports high-speed(480Mbps), full-speed(12Mbps) and low-speed (1.5Mbps) mode
Respectable but nothing outstanding for USB and the PX5, functional and compatible with your common addons.
PX5 overall
The PX5 was ground breaking in 2016. It made many modern android headunit possible. Without the new PX5 processor the old designs would still be based on phone chips. With wasteful clock cycles and unnecessary extra production costs of these chips there was room for change. While the PX6 has taken over as an almost drop-in replacement over the PX5, it is still considered a modern processor for an android headunit. If you are looking at a new android head unit, you will unlikely to find a PX5 based unit now. Most of the current android headunit models have been upgraded to PX6 or are using later designs of processor cores.
If you see new PX5 octa core processor powered android headunits, they will be old stock or there will be an update deep in the description to describe the use of the new processor (PX6).
