Some people think that the two cameras are identical and that NX500 is just software crippled, there actually are several hardware differences that we can observe:
Both are more advanced in NX1.
| NX1 | NX500 |
| cma: CMA: reserved 256 MiB at 96000000 | cma: CMA: reserved 288 MiB at 94000000 |
| cma: CMA: reserved 128 MiB at 8e000000 | cma: CMA: reserved 72 MiB at 8f800000 |
| Memory: 115000k/115000k available, 409288k reserved, 0K highmem | Memory: 142828k/142828k available, 381460k reserved, 0K highmem |
| [arch/arm/mach-drime5/board-d5_nx1.c, fn:drime5_es_init, 3636] wm8962 | [arch/arm/mach-drime5/board-d5_nx500.c, fn:drime5_es_init, 1745] nau8822 |
| DRIME5: IDS : 26(ISP), 38(ARM) PROMISE : 87 RESULT : 6 | DRIME5: IDS : 23(ISP), 35(ARM) PROMISE : 82 RESULT : 5 |
| DRIME5 ASV : 6 Group | DRIME5 ASV : 5 Group |
| VDD_ISP: 770 ←-1400 mV at 1030 mV | VDD_ISP: 770 ←-1400 mV at 870 mV |
Cores seem to be identical (from OS point of view) but LSI seem to be different with different parameters. Probably related to various IP blocks in SoC.
Although there is roughly the same amount of RAM available to Linux, NX1 has significantly more memory available to (presumably) RTOS portion as can be seen from st cap capmm show
NX1 has 1696 MB and NX500 has 704 MB. With the Linux OS taking ~200 MB it leaves ~1.5 GB for NX1 and 0.5 GB for NX500 which is in line with real world buffer performance. It is also possible that RAM is not running at the same speed between the two.