XDA Developer shared Sabrina’s pre-release firmware design, uncovered some of the hardware specifications for the Android TV dongle by analyzing the Device Tree Source files found inside the boot image. The records state which SoC platform hardware features to enable when booting. Since the main DTS file for Android is very long and hard to parse without knowledge of the implementation of the Linux kernel, we will not be posting the full record in this article. However, we can see two critical details of the “Sabrina” Android TV dongle device at the very top of the file: It has 2 GB of RAM and is powered by the system-on-chip Amlogic S905X2.
The Amlogic S905X2 is fabricated on such a design phase of 12 nm and has a quad-core Processor with 4 ARM Cortex-A53 Processing cores clocked up to 1.8GHz. An ARM Mali-G31 MP2 GPU is connected to the CPU. The SoC allows video encoding for material in 4Kp75 10-bit H.265, video performance up to 4Kp60 via HDMI 2.1, HDR video replay with HDR10, HLG, and Dolby Vision, and more.
The S905X2 is a very common Android TV system SoC, so we’re not shocked to see it control the Android TV dongle from Google.
Many Google’s Android TV dongle hardware capabilities in the DTS package include the Wi-Fi / Bluetooth BCM43569 combination chip from Broadcom and the Tensilica HiFi 4 DSP from Cadence. In a pre-installed device program named “SabrinaService,” XDA Recognized Developer deadman96385 has noticed several other curious aspects of Google’s Android TV dongle. Inside this program are references to “ALLM,” which stands for Auto Low Latency Mode.
This is an HDMI 2.1 specification option that enables the device to send a signal to the connected TV and get it to disable any post-processing features that could add latency to the video display. A lot of televisions are going to market this feature as a “Game Mode” because it is most useful when gaming to reduce the lag. We don’t know when Google will introduce the Android TV dongle or what it’s going to be sold at, so we’re certainly excited about it coming into the market. In the market Android TV room, which is currently sponsored by Xiaomi and NVIDIA, we are long overdue for further rivalry.
