Huawei is backing an initiative for an AOSP (Android open source project) using ARM-based hardware and the Linaro open source collaborative engineering organization to develop the software. Their common aim: an ARM ecosystem.

The new HiKey 960 dev platform from Huawei is now listed on the 96Boards website and will become available through global distribution channels. It is expected to be of interest to mobile developers and product design for markets like digital signage, point of sale (POS) and robotics.

96Boards is a big thing in the professional electronics scene and the platform was featured in Elektor Business Magazine 1/2017 as well as in an Elektor TV interview.

The new board is based around the Huawei Kirin 960 octa-core ARM big.LITTLE processor with four ARM Cortex-A73 and four Cortex-A53 cores with 3 GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM memory, 32 GB of UFS 2.1 flash storage, and the latest generation Mali-G71 MP8 graphics processor.

Available now through Archermind and LeMaker, the HiKey 960 96Boards development platform is on sale at US$239.