Freescale i.MX6 Quad-Core Benchmark Demo

Freescale is showcasing the performance of their Quad Core ARM Cortex-A9 i.MX6 Quad processor at ARM Techcon 2011. The Freescale i.MX6 reference design runs a demo in Android 3.x (Honeycomb) with four windows: JPEG Decoding Window Web browser rendering and scrolling HTML5 Fish tank CPU Usage real-time chart The 3 windows used for the benchmark are all using software processing (no GPU involved) to show to performance improvement by moving from 1 to 2 and finally 4 cores. The benchmark results are quite impressive as with one core JPEG decoding is about 0.6 frame per second and with 4 cores it can decode 4.2 frames per seconds while other windows also show performance improvement.  Freescale says there was little modifications done to make the software work on four core and you don’t even need to have multi-threaded applications to take advantage of 4 cores as the OS will usually take […]

Qualcomm Fast Computer Vision SDK

Qualcomm introduced FastCV (Fast Computer Vision), a mobile-optimized computer vision (CV) library that includes the most frequently used vision processing functions for use across a wide array of Android mobile devices. FastCV provides computationally intensive vision processing APIs, with hardware acceleration and better performance on mobile devices. FastCV is designed for efficiency on all ARM-based processors, but is also especially tuned to take advantage of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors (Qualcomm S2 and above).  That’s because FastCV for Snapdragon can offload processing onto various subsystems within the processor, whereas FastCV for ARM is limited to acceleration on the CPU. FastCV is the framework at the heart of Qualcomm’s vision-based Augmented Reality (AR) SDK, because AR is much more precise and useful when it’s based on camera input than on location-based estimates. Qualcomm anticipates that FastCV will be used to build additional frameworks that will allow developers of computer vision apps to build […]

I’m Watch: Freescale i.MX233 based Android Watch

I’m Watch is a wireless (Bluetooth) watch designed by an Italian Company http://www.imwatch.it currently showcased at ARM Techcon 2011. The device is powered by Freescale i.MX233 feature a capacitive touchcreen and runs Android. It can synchronize with any Android smartphone and iPhones via Bluetooth. The company developed an Android API for this watch. The product will be ready before Xmas and be available for 299 Euros (base version) in Europe, although you’d have to wait until January if you are based in the US.  If you want to show off you can buy the Gold version for 12,000 Euros. There already have pre-orders for 30,000 pieces. The company will also announce other services at CES 2012 such as I’m Market, an app store to download apps for the watch and I’m Music an app to listen music via the watch. Watch the video below to see the Android watch in […]

Raspberry Pi at ARM Techcon 2011

Raspberry Pi Foundation is currently at ARM Techcon 2011 showcasing their 25 USD ARM11 Linux Computer unveiled last May. The board is build around Broadcom BCM2835 (ARM11 @ 700Mhz + GPU) application processor with 128/256MB “soldered” on top of the processor (Package on package (PoP) technology) and a USB Hub/Ethernet adapter chip and that’s it. The board features an Ethernet 10/100 RJ45 connector, 2 USB 2.0 port, an Audio out, HDMI and composite video output and an SD card slot. They currently only have the larger alpha board, the final board will be shrunk to the size of a business card and should be available in November 2011 (but most probably December). They believe the board will have better multimedia performance than the Beagleboard. I’m not convinced of that yet, but we’ll see. There will be two versions: Without network and 128 MB RAM – 25 USD Network support (Ethernet) and […]

Ubuntu on Tegra 2 Netbook and Ubuntu Server on Pandaboard

Canonical showcases several demos at ARM Techcon 2011: Toshiba AC-100 Netbook (Nvidia Tegra 2)  running Ubuntu 11.10. with Unity interface. Freescale i.MX53 board playing a 1080p video in Ubuntu 11.10. TI Pandaboard running Ubuntu 11.10 Server Edition. Ubuntu 11.04 is not officially supported for Toshiba AC-100, but the community if working on it and the image can be downloaded at http://ac100.gudinna.com/ Canonical however supports Netbook and Headless (Server) edition for OMAP3 (Beagleboard) and OMAP4 (Pandaboard). Those image are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/NattyReleaseNotes Watch the interview by Charbax and demos in the video below. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI) Linux Kernel for Consumer Electronics

The Linux Foundation announced a new project, the Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), created by the Consumer Electronics Workgroup (CE WG) at Linuxcon Europe 2011 in Prague. LTSI aims at reducing duplication of effort in maintaining separate private industry kernel trees. The LTSI project intends to deliver an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two to three years. The project is backed by several companies in the consumer electronics industry including Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Qualcomm Atheros, Renesas Electronics Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Toshiba. LTSI will allow device makers to spend less time doing significant back-porting, bug testing and driver development on their own, which carries substantial cost in terms of time-to-market, as well as development and engineering effort to maintain those custom kernels. In some ways, this is similar to Linaro, […]

Archos 80/101 G9 Firmware Version 3.2.6.1 Released

Archos has just released a new firmware for Archos 80 G9 / 101 G9. The most important fix is for Android Marketplace that did not work properly for everybody. Here’s the changelog: Version 3.2.61 – October 21st, 2011 Google apps: new Honeycomb release 4 integrated. It contains the new Market (v3.1.7) that solves the issue of some Google accounts not being able to install applications. Power save: disable 3G USB host port by default Power: fix device sometimes not rebooting properly MTP: fix Video folder listed empty from host PC happening sometimes Audio: better volume management when a notification occurs during music playback Input method: disable switch to Arabic keyboard when Android default keyboard gets killed The firmware can be downloaded at http://update.archos.com/9/gen9/gen9_3.2.61/firmware_archos_it4.aos Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, […]

Yocto Project Release 1.1 Announced

The Linux foundation announced Yocto Project Release 1.1 today. This release codenamed “Edison” and based on Poky 6.0 is the the second release of the project, one year after it was announced in October 2010 to provide developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. The Yocto Project reached the following milestones during the last year: Alignment of OpenEmbedded technology and the inclusion of OpenEmbedded representation in the Yocto Project governance structure. The projects share a common core that consists of software build recipes and core Linux components that prevent fragmentation and reinforce the OpenEmbedded methodology as an open standard for embedded Linux build systems. Contribution of tools and technologies such as Cross-prelink, EGLIBC, Pseudo, Shoeleather Lab (for automated testing) and Swabber have been contributed from Intel, Mentor Graphics, MontaVista Software and Wind River. Commercial adoption with examples such as […]

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