I been seeing references to the 2 different versions of the CPU we use, whats the difference, I have a 3.1 board with an R16
I’ll start by saying, you are not missing out on anything having one, and not the other. If that’s your main concern, you can rest easy that for all intents and purposes, they are the same.
So, from a functional point of view, here’s what I’ve found.
I’ve gotten my hands on both an R16 (two of them) and an R16J board, in an attempt to find out why on earth some people have the flickering screen problem.
All three of my boards don’t exhibit any problems which is frustrating! This is across two gameshell hardware sets, using 6 different batteries, and a plethora of SD micro cards.
Polling users who do have the problem, there is a fairly equal mix of people with both board revisions, thus making next no correlation between exhibited problems and board revision.
My conclusion is that the only factor that has stayed the same is the user who built their machine, leading me go believe any differences potentially are user installation/climate/cleanliness etc.
According to https://linux-sunxi.org/R16 , the R16 is a relabelled A33.
The J would no doubt be merely a revision number, that may have different components sourced from elsewhere. Here’s an example of a vendor that sells bulk lots of R16-J’s.
(Most other sources refer to the R16 revision)
I couldn’t find anything specific to the R16, but another allwinner board makes some passing remarks regarding different voltages requires for the J revision of the A20 board. (Page 10)
The points in question being:
The preferred way of powering the board is via the PWR jack with 7-24V DC with a power of at least 5W (usually 6Vx1A, 12Vx0.5A, etc.). This will make the board fully powered and able to power all the peripherals connected to it.
For boards revision J or newer; the voltage applied to the power jack should be (6-16)V for older board revisions
Keep in mind, this is a COMPLETELY different boards so the J revision probably has nothing in common. And even if it was, the range is wide enough for overlap on the off chance there’s a deviation in the battery’s output. So I guess, potentially something to look out for if you’re trying to apply an over/undervoltage mod for overclocking purpose. Ie, nothing that most people should worry about.
This reminds me of the iPhone 6S, and it’s two chipset revisions that caused a big hoo har. At the end of the day, it made barely any difference, but people wanted to complain about having one processor over the other.
Tl;dr. They’re the same chip, just a different revision. One isn’t better than the other. They’re made to do the same thing.
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