Nvidia Tegra 4 Details and Roadmap Leaked

Last year, Nvidia announced the Tegra family roadmap until 2014 with Kal-El (NVidia Tegra 3),  Wayne (NVidia Tegra 4),  Logan (Nvidia Tegra 5) and Stark (Nvidia Tegra 6). The first half of 2012 should be the time where the Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) should be announced. In the meantime, VRZone shared a slide showing the different versions of Tegra 4 and the detailed roadmap. NVidia Tegra 4 processor will used the same 4-PLUS-1 configuration (4 main cores + 1 low power companion core) as Nvidia Tegra 3, except the Cortex A9 cores will be replaced by Cortex A15 and the chipset will run at frequencies ranging from 1.2GHz to 2.0GHz. There will be 4 flavors of Tegra 4: T40 – Quad Core Cortex A15 @ 1.8 GHz aimed at 10″ high-end tablets. T43 – Quad Core Cortex A15 @ 2.0 GHz aimed at 10″ high-end tablets. AP40 – Quad Core […]

Mele A1000 Android 2.3 STB Unboxing and Review

I’ve finally received the Mele A1000 media player I ordered 3 weeks ago. I mainly plan to use it as a Linux development platform for Allwinner A10 processor, but today I’ll just post some unboxing pictures and provide some feedback about the Android software running on the box. I received the device in the box below. (Sorry about the picture quality, I took pictures with my smartphone). Once you open the box, you’ll get see the set-top box, related accessories, a (not so useful) user guide in English and Chinese and what looks like a warranty card. Once you unpack everything you get the set-top box, 2.5″ hard drive case, composite cable, remote control (infrared) and 5V power supply. You’ll noticed some buttons on the remote control have markings in Chinese, this is where the user manual can be useful. You may already have seen the box itself (with clearer […]

Axiomtek MANO120 Mini-ITX Board Powered by AMD G-series APU

Axiomtek announced the MANO120 mini-ITX motherboard featuring an AMD G-Series APU dual core T56N with AMD A55E FCH which supports dual video output (dual views) via VGA, HDMI and LVDS interface. The board can support up to 4 GB of DDR3 1333 memory, up to 5 SATA hard drives and a CFast slot. The MANO120 also comes with one PCIe x4 slot and one PCI Express Mini Card slot. The company says the MANO120 industrial grade motherboard is ideal for digital signage, DVR (Digital Video Recording), and NVR (Network Video Recorder) applications. Here are Axiomtek MANO120 mini-ITX board specifications. CPU – AMD G-Series APU T56N @ 1.65 GHz with AMD Radeon HD6320 Graphic engine Chipset – AMD A55E FCH System Memory – 204-pin SO-DIMM supports DDR3-1066/1333 max (up to 4 GB) BIOS – AMI EFI 16Mb SPI SSD – CFast slot Expansion Interfaces: PCIe x4 slot PCIe Mini Card CFast […]

Daisy: An Exynos 5250 (Cortex A15) Based ChromeBook

Thomas Taschauer has reported on his blog that Google was working on several Chromebooks including one codenamed “Daisy” powered by an an ARM chip by just looking at Chromium OS’ issue tracker. By looking more into details, we can find out that Daisy development makes use of the kernel config for  Samsung SMDK5250,  Samsung development board for the Exynos 5250 (Dual Core Cortex A15) processor. Daisy also appears to have an Ethernet port, a feature not seen on other Chromebooks which only feature WiFi or 3G for connectivity. 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

Mele A2000 Android 2.3 Media Player Powered by AllWinner A10

Last month, I ordered a Mele A1000 in order to hack it to run Linux as it uses the same processor – the Cortex A8/Mali-400MP based AllWinner A10 – as the one planned for the low cost Rhombus Tech board. I have yet to receive the device, but Mele (迈乐) has already released  the Mele A2000, an Android 2.3 set-box box also powered by AllWinner A10. Here are Mele A2000 specifications: CPU: ARM Cortex A8 AllWinner A10 @ 1 GHz (It can be apparently be overclocked up to @ 1.5GHz) GPU: Mali 4000 Memory: DDR3 512MB RAM / 4GB Nand Flash OS System: Android 2.3.4 (Upgradable to Android 4.0) External Storage: Supports SD card up to 32GB, supports 2.5″ SATA HDD up to 1TB, Supports max 16GB USB flash disk Video codecs: HD MPEG-1/2/4. H.264. HD AVC/VC-1, RM/RMVB, Xvid/DviX 4/5/6, RealVideo 8/9/10, VP6 Video Formats: ts, m2ts, tp, trp, mkv, mp4, […]

Green Hills MULTI 6.0 Compiler Improves ARM MCU Performance by up to 40%

Last week at Design West 2012, Green Hills Software announced it had achieved the highest compiler performance scores ever certified by EEMBC CoreMark and that it outperformed the nearest competing compilers by 35.5% using its MULTI 6.0 – Compiler 2012. Benchmarks were completed on 3 ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers: Freescale Kinetis K60 MCU @ 100 Mhz – 35.5% improvement over nearest competitor. Freescale Kinetis K70 MCU @ 120 Mhz – 29.6% improvement over nearest competitor. STMicroelectronics STM32F417IGt6 @ 168 MHz – 34.7% improvement over nearest competitor. Since apparently it’s bad marketing to name competitors in press releases, I went directly to the source (EEMBC Coremark benchmark results) to check out the results and competitors (IAR and Keil) for Kinetis K60 MCU. The first thing you may notice is that there are 2 tests per compiler / MCU combination. That’s because there 2 test configurations: Code in internal Flash – Data in internal […]

Calixto Systems Announces TI AM335x VERSA SOM

Calixto Systems is a technology company based in Bangalore, India, providing System-on-Modules (SoM), evaluation boards (EVM) and consultancy services for Android, Linux and WinCE. The company has announced an update to its VERSA  families of system-on-modules by including support for Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x processors.  The previous version is based on TI OMAP-L138 C6-Integra DSP+ARM Processor. The AM335x SoM will provide higher performance than the previous module and targets industrial automation, smart grid, remote terminals, healthcare, handheld point-of-service (POS) terminals and weighing scales. Here are M335x VERSA SOM specifications: Texas Instruments AM335x (Cortex A8) processor @ 720 MHz with 3D Graphics Support (PowerVR) 256/512 MB of DDR3 SPI Flash Wireless LAN (b/g/n) (Optional) Bluetooth 4.0 (Optional)  Two 10/100 Ethernet (One PHY on SOM) 24 bit LCD with Touch Screen interface 2x USB 2.0 OTG, 2x CAN, 4x UARTs McASP, PRU , SPI, I2C etc. 200 pin SODIMM connector Dimension: 34mm x […]

ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5) Demos At Design West

ARM has shot a few video demos of their ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5), a software development tool suite for ARM platforms, at Design West 2012. The first video shows DS 5 running on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 platform (dual cortex A9 + FPGA), and we can see the memory map, registers, call graphs and stack usage. We can also see real-time processor switching and the function that takes the most CPU resources (profiling). The second videos showcases ARM DS-5 Streamline, a performance analyzer, which helps determine how well programs are running on a Linux or Android platform, on an Samsung Exynos 4210 platform (Origen board?). This tool also to profile both the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 and ARM Mali-400 MP GPU in the platform. We are shown three types of reports: CPU/GPU Loading Threads usage Power Usage per application The third and last video shows ARM DS 5 on Freescale i.MX6 […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC