Qualcomm Snapdragon Category - CNX Software

September 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linux 6.11 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.11 is out with Linus Torvalds’ announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML): I’m once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out. The last week was actually pretty quiet and calm, which is nice to see. The shortlog is below for anybody who wants to look at the details, but it really isn’t very many patches, and the patches are all pretty small. Nothing in particular stands out – the biggest patch in here is for Hyper-V Confidential Computing documentation. Anyway, with this, the merge window will obviously open tomorrow, and I already have 40+ pull requests pending. That said, exactly _because_ I’m on the road, it will probably be a fairly slow start to the merge window, since not only am I on my laptop, there’s OSS Europe starting tomorrow and then the […]

September 9, 2024September 9, 2024 by Sayantan Nandy - 12 Comments

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 8-core – A 4 GHz octa-core processor for entry-level Copilot+ PCs and laptops

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X line of ARM-based processors is designed for Windows laptops, offering CPUs capable of competing with Intel and AMD processors. The Snapdragon X Plus (10 core) and Snapdragon X Elite, announced last year, include high-performance NPUs for AI processing. Qualcomm has now introduced the entry-level Snapdragon X Plus 8-core processor, targeting the $700 to $900 laptop market instead of the ~$1,300+ asked for something like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 15. It reduces CPU and graphics performance while maintaining the same AI features as the higher-end models. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus lineup includes two octa-core processors: the X1P-46-100 and X1P-42-100, both built on a 4nm process. These processors come with eight Oryon CPU cores, clocked at 4GHz and 3.4GHz respectively, and are equipped with the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, delivering 45 TOPS for AI tasks like Copilot+ PC. They also integrate Qualcomm Adreno GPUs offering 2.1 TFLOPS for the […]

September 9, 2024September 8, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android 15 runs on Linaro development boards based on Qualcomm and HiSilicon chips

Android 15 source code was just pushed to AOSP last week, and Linaro has already ported it to four reference development boards based on Qualcomm and HiSilicon/Huawei chips namely Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devboard (SM8550-HDK), Qualcomm Robotics Board RB5, Qualcomm Dragonboard 845c (DB845c, aka RB3) and HiSilicon Hikey960. Recent Google Pixel phones can already get Android 15 beta, but that makes the aforementioned development boards some of the first hardware platforms running Android 15 which could be useful to app developers and people wanting to customize Android 15 OS for their target product(s). Android 15 worked on the same day as the release to AOSP thanks to a collaboration between Linaro and Google to make sure reference boards get support as soon as possible, and in this case, we had a “0-day boot” as Linaro puts it. This collaboration started in 2022 with Qualcomm Robotics RB3 and RB5 platforms getting […]

September 2, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

DietPi 9.7 and Armbian 24.8 released with improved support for Rockchip, Amlogic, and Allwinner SBCs

Armbian and DietPi are two separate projects that provide Linux-based OS images optimized for Arm-based single board computers. The last time we had a look at both projects was in June with the release of Armbian 24.5.1 and DietPi 9.4, but there have been several updates since then including the releases of the latest DietPi 9.7 and Armbian 24.8 Yelt just a few days ago. So let’s check out the latest changes. DietPi 9.7 DietPi is a lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution for SBCs and server systems that ships as a minimal image but users can install any packages they want, including the ones required for desktop environment, to match the requirements of the applications. It’s notably used by the Linamp project – a Raspberry Pi 4-based project that brings WinAMP to real life – that we covered a few weeks ago. DietPi 9.7 was released on August 25, 2024 with […]

July 15, 2024July 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]

May 28, 2024May 28, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

ECS “LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop” Windows 10 mini PC goes for $99.99 (Promo)

ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop discount

ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop powered by a Qualcomm Arm mini PC-looking developer kit was launched in 2021 for $219, and the company is now apparently getting rid of stocks and selling the remaining Snapdragon 7c devices for $99.99 on Stack Social. The system features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c (SC7180) octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, HDMI output, 10/100Mbps Ethernet and WiFi 5, and several USB ports. As a reminder, here are the ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Compute Platform (SC7180) with octa-core Qualcomm Kryo 468 (2x Cortex-A76, 6x Cortex-A55) CPU @ up to 2.4 GHz, Adreno 618 GPU System Memory – 4GB Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card socket Video & audio output – 1x HDMI port Networking 10/100M Ethernet WiFi 5 and Bluetooth USB 1x USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) Type-A port 1x USB 2.0 Type-A port […]

May 22, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 27 Comments

Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows features Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Arm SoC for AI PC application development

Qualcomm Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows is a mini PC-looking development platform based on the Snapdragon X Elite 12-core Arm processor with up to 75 AI TOPS of performance designed to help developers natively port apps to the Elite X SoC and develop new AI applications besides the Copilot+ AI PC features developed internally by Microsoft. Although it’s slightly bigger, the external design looks similar to the Windows Dev Kit 2023 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform, but internally, the new devkit features the much more powerful 4.3 GHz X Elite 12-core 64-bit Armv8 Oryon processor coupled with 32GB LPDDR5x RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD, and offering a range of ports and features such as USB4 and WiFi 7. Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows (2024) specifications: SoC – Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-00-1DE) CPU – 12-core 64-bit Armv8 Oryon processor clocked at up to 3.8 GHz, or 4.3 […]

May 13, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]