I recently started tinkering with Allwinner’s chips and discovered a fascinating phenomenon.
There are many things related to sunxi in Allwinner’s SDK, such as file names, structures, and variables. This made me wonder, why is there so much about sunxi in Allwinner’s SDK?
It’s important to know that Allwinner’s English name is “Allwinner,” which seems to have no relation to sunxi.
One of Allwinner’s strong competitors is Rockchip, whose English name is “rockchip.” When looking at Rockchip’s SDK, you will see many rk-related files, structures, variables, and so on.
I find the naming convention of rk to be elegant, but the reasoning behind Allwinner’s naming is unclear.
I even asked some experts at Allwinner about this issue, but couldn’t get any useful information.
Moreover, someone actually mentioned:
It’s similar to how we name software versions. At first, the software version number is v1, then it changes to v1.1 when we find issues, and later to v1.1.1, and if problems persist, it becomes v1.1.1.1. An expert in my group said this name is because Allwinner had a development name called sunxi.
In Allwinner’s development documentation, we can see sunxi — referring to a series of SOC hardware platforms by Allwinner.
If anyone knows the origin of this name, feel free to comment.