[netvlada]

And a Full Body Condom just to be sure, to accompany the Tin Foil Hat.

Let me ask how much Diesel emissions testing, did all those thousand of premium VW dealerships do worldwide when selling cars to customers?
Nada, none. There is a degree of trust from the manufacturer with every product sold to a customer, no matter what it is.

Let put this into perspective shall we, these ARM based AML SoC's cost next to nothing compared to full monty Intel i series products. Which still cannot give you 10bit Hardware HEVC and HDMI 2.0 at a relatively affordable price.

WeTek did actually test the original Revision B. S905 a hell of a lot and found video decoding produced artifacts for 10bit 2160p HEVC Sat. TV streams. This was directly relevant for the S905 line of products they intended to sell and actually delayed the launch of the S905 equipped WeTek Hub. The CPU speed pretty much pales into insignificance, when all you need is a decent GPU/VPU that Hardware decodes nearly everything.

Yes,but if amlogic kernel give false repoort thet clock is on 2.0ghz,and actual clock is on 1.5ghz,then wetek must to sell their products with 1.5ghz statements on the box and on their web site.
I did not pay to wetek via amlogic account,i have payed it to wetek account and need refund from them.
This is wetek problem,they did not test what they have bought from amlogic.

[gsmtech]

Note the new S912 SOC is also affected by the Amlogic cheat, maybe this plays some part in explaining why the benchmarks and antutu scores so far on this S912 are not particularly impressive compared to a standard S905, because it's limited to 1.5ghz.
You do get 4k VP9 support though and H265 10 bit, HDMI 2.0a, better GPU. How much real benefit if you don't need VP9 decode or H265
Looks like I'll be sticking with my S905 for at least another year.

[JonSnow88]

10 bit h265 works on s905, what you mean is 10bit h264

[noggin]

Note the new S912 SOC is also affected by the Amlogic cheat, maybe this plays some part in explaining why the benchmarks and antutu scores so far on this S912 are not particularly impressive compared to a standard S905, because it's limited to 1.5ghz.
You do get 4k VP9 support though and H265 10 bit, HDMI 2.0a, better GPU. How much real benefit if you don't need VP9 decode or H265
Looks like I'll be sticking with my S905 for at least another year.

You get UHD/4K10 bit HEVC/H265 with the S905 (I'm playing 10 bit HEVC/H265 content on my C2, Hub and MiniMX). The main benefits of the S912 appear to be VP9 UHD/4K support, and I guess HDMI 2.0a allows for more HDR support potentially - but HDR is still very early days.

[wesk05]

S905 can decode 10-bit HEVC but the output will only be 8-bit (assuming that you care about it). You will need S905X or S912 for 10-bit output (limited to 2160p). You will not get 10-bit output for 1080p. Will have to see what the just announced Minix U9-H (S912) is going to do.

[dukester]

While you AML budget guys are at it get in contact with all the Dirt Cheap AML sellers and tell them they are now falsely advertising if you really want a level playing field. If regular upset AML poster here don't then I'm going to accuse them of trolling the thread from this point onwards.

meh, No plans here to message anyone, its a lost cause. I simply brought up Wetek because i knew Ned would be able to give a response quickly. No need to call anyone else a troll, you've been trolling this thread for almost a year now, since page 1.. lol

[noggin]

S905 can decode 10-bit HEVC but the output will only be 8-bit (assuming that you care about it). You will need S905X or S912 for 10-bit output (limited to 2160p). You will not get 10-bit output for 1080p. Will have to see what the just announced Minix U9-H (S912) is going to do.

Ah - so the S905 is definitely hardware limited to 8-bit HDMI 2.0 output?

Interesting - I knew it didn't have HDR functionality, but didn't know it was limited to 8 bit.

Does it support any >2160/50p HDMI output modes other than 8-bit 4:2:0 ? (Any 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 options at 8 bit?) Or is it limited to HDMI 1.4b bandwiths (which 4:2:0 2160/60p 8 bit just fits in - which is, no doubt, why the format was added to HDMI 2.0...)

[gsmtech]

And a Full Body Condom just to be sure, to accompany the Tin Foil Hat.

Let me ask how much Diesel emissions testing, did all those thousand of premium VW dealerships do worldwide when selling cars to customers?
Nada, none. There is a degree of trust from the manufacturer with every product sold to a customer, no matter what it is.

Let put this into perspective shall we, these ARM based AML SoC's cost next to nothing compared to full monty Intel i series products. Which still cannot give you 10bit Hardware HEVC and HDMI 2.0 at a relatively affordable price.

WeTek did actually test the original Revision B. S905 a hell of a lot and found video decoding produced artifacts for 10bit 2160p HEVC Sat. TV streams. This was directly relevant for the S905 line of products they intended to sell and actually delayed the launch of the S905 equipped WeTek Hub. The CPU speed pretty much pales into insignificance, when all you need is a decent GPU/VPU that Hardware decodes nearly everything.

Yes,but if amlogic kernel give false repoort thet clock is on 2.0ghz,and actual clock is on 1.5ghz,then wetek must to sell their products with 1.5ghz statements on the box and on their web site.
I did not pay to wetek via amlogic account,i have payed it to wetek account and need refund from them.
This is wetek problem,they did not test what they have bought from amlogic.

I agree, that analysis is spot on, ned who works for WETEK has already posted here that WETEK will amend the specs on their website to say the S905 runs at 1.5ghz not 2ghz. he's also asked users that want refunds due to misleading spec to contact WETEK support for refunds, so I would say contact them and request a refund if you feel fit. I don't know if the same announcement and offer has gone out on the WETEK website and forums... probably not....as I can see they havent even updated the specs yet they still read:

"Processor (CPU): AMLogic S905-H (up to 2 GHz Quad Core)" For the WETEK Hub.... Pretty slow reposnse compared to Hard Kernel.

It's also true that it doesn't appear that any testing was done to uncover the "cheat" that Amlogic had coded, i.e: the kernel silently ignores and drops any requests for clock speeds higher tha 1.5ghz. This may have been because...WETEK didn't specficially run any testing that would have uncovered this oparticular issues, or this is a sneakily coded "cheat" by Amlogic that has fooled a lot of people including benchmark testers, it's only know thats it's surfaced, thanks to investigation from end users who raised it with HardKernel, HardKernel confirmed the issue.

[wesk05]

Ah - so the S905 is definitely hardware limited to 8-bit HDMI 2.0 output?

Interesting - I knew it didn't have HDR functionality, but didn't know it was limited to 8 bit.

Does it support any >2160/50p HDMI output modes other than 8-bit 4:2:0 ? (Any 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 options at 8 bit?) Or is it limited to HDMI 1.4b bandwiths (which 4:2:0 2160/60p 8 bit just fits in - which is, no doubt, why the format was added to HDMI 2.0...)

I haven't seen anything other than 8-bit output from Minix U1. I don't think it is a SoC limitation. S905 datasheet mentions 6Gbps/TMDS channel data rate. The clock is given as 2.97GHz. For HDMI 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 8-bit YCbCr 4:2:0 you only need 1.485GHz. This is all based on the datasheet. We now know that Amlogic can specify whatever they want on paper

Couple of weeks ago, Minix Ken posted this on Minix forum:

We are testing 4K 60Hz 4:4:4 internally and may release it anytime soon.

If this really works, we can say that the SoC supports full HDMI 2.0.

[Theguyuk]

There are also numerous posts on cnx-software discussing audio pass through problems on AMLogic S905 to s912 range. Cnx-software has reviews of the budget and high end models, wetek included.

Is the audio problems software or bogus hardware specs. How are people to know when claimed professionals and benchmark software have been fooled as others mention!

[Ned Scott]

There are also numerous posts on cnx-software discussing audio pass through problems on AMLogic S905 to s912 range. Cnx-software has reviews of the budget and high end models, wetek included.

Is the audio problems software or bogus hardware specs. How are people to know when claimed professionals and benchmark software have been fooled as others mention!

Audio is an entirely different issue. No one has been "fooled". The spec sheet from Amlogic said "up to 2Ghz" and marketing people out that down on websites. 99% of S905 hardware has no reason to even attempt to use the 2Ghs frequency. It was caught by people with ODROID-C2s because those products focus on being real development boards that do get pushed to the limits, rather than just being media centers.

At worst, media box sellers are guilty of making you think that frequency and number of cores has a real world value. It doesn't. It doesn't come up in testing because it has no impact on the use-case of being a media box.

[Ned Scott]

Regarding the WeTek product listings for Hub and Play2, our web guy was apparently on vacation, but it should be handled soon. (I'm just a support tech, so I don't have direct access except for blog posts).

[JonSnow88]

There are also numerous posts on cnx-software discussing audio pass through problems on AMLogic S905 to s912 range. Cnx-software has reviews of the budget and high end models, wetek included.

Is the audio problems software or bogus hardware specs. How are people to know when claimed professionals and benchmark software have been fooled as others mention!

come on dude, audio pass through is 99% software related when it comes to cheap android boxes. I have one with LE and pass through audio works fine. Quit your trolling and clam down, the hardware works as expected sure not at the advertised frequency but works none the less. If you don't like amlogic then fine use plenty of the other hardware that can run Kodi don't need your trolling.

[wrxtasy]

At worst, media box sellers are guilty of making you think that frequency and number of cores has a real world value. It doesn't. It doesn't come up in testing because it has no impact on the use-case of being a media box.

This is exactly correct, raw CPU speed is not at all that important in a media player box when you already have very powerful VPU/GPU's included.

The only reason the HardKernel users discovered this S905 GHz issue, was when some were using S905 ODROID C2's in server farm setups doing SETI data crunching and did not notice any increase in data crunching performance between 1.5GHz and 2GHz CPU clocking. HardKernel did not discover it.
AMLogic had everyone confused. Even Xiaomi, the massive Chinese smartphone maker, with the soon to be released Xiaomi Mi (S9xx) Box.

[Ned Scott]

Actually, I wouldn't mind just looking at some kind of CPU benchmark for these things. It still wouldn't matter for most media-related uses, but that would be far more useful than CPU frequency ;)