Giggle Score Says ODROID-N2 Best Value, Raspberry Pi Zero Worst Value

Giggle Score

[Update May 7, 2019: Giggle Score has been updated to use 7-zip to benchmark the boards instead of sysbench, and the “best value” rankings are now quite different] People like to compare single board computers, and usually want to have a simple answer as to which is better than the others. But in practice it’s impossible, because the beauty of SBCs is that they are so versatile and can be used in a wide variety of project, and that means in some cases the “best board” may be completely useless to you since it lacks a critical feature and interface for YOUR project be it H.265 video encoding or a MIPI DSI display interface. Still, it’s still always fun to look at benchmark scores and trying to compare SBCs, and for projects that mostly require CPU processing power it may also be useful. Robbie Ferguson has been developing and maintaining […]

RK3588 8K Arm Cortex-A76/A55 SoC, Rockchip Roadmap to 2020

RK3588

Rockchip had their annual event yesterday offering a view of past achievements, as well as a glimpse into the future with new products announcements. The company is ready to go to the next level with their Rockchip RK3588 featuring Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 cores, 8K video decoding support, 4K user interface support, an NPU 2.0 (Neural Processing Unit) manufactured using an 8nm LP process. The processor should have eight cores in a 4+4 dynamIQ configuration according to a tip from “coldfish”, and the new 8nm process is expected to increase performance by 20 to 30 percent, while the power consumption will be reduced by 40 percent. Mass production is expected for Q1 2020. The company also showed a slide with their video encoder/decoder IP, and Gen3 should be in RK3588 since that’s the only one with an 8K 60 fps decoder using either AVS3 or H.266 (VVC). I’m quite confused with […]

Novasom M7 SBC aims to be a Drop-In Replacement for Raspberry Pi 3 in Industrial Projects

Novasom M7 Raspberry Pi Rockchip RK3328

Raspberry Pi boards are great for education and hobbyist projects, and while they are also found in industrial projects, they may not be the ideal solution for such commercial projects because of potential availability issues, stability issues in demanding environments, lack of certifications, and lack of commercial support. Novasom RASPMOOD family of SBCs aims to provide a drop-in replacement for Raspberry Pi based designs by providing mechanically and electrically compatible boards, as well as a software layer that allows the RASPMOOD boards to leverage the software you’ve already developed for your Raspberry Pi 3 design. Today we’ll specifically look at Novasom M7 “RASPMOOD” board – aka SBC-M7 – powered by a Rockchip RK3328 processor. Specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3328 quad core Cortex-A53 processor with Mali-450MP4 GPU System Memory – Up to 4 GB DDR3 RAM Storage – Up to 256 GB eMMC Flash + uSD slot Video Output – HDMI […]

Batocera.Linux OS Combines Kodi & Retro Gaming for Raspberry Pi & ODROID Boards

batocera.linux

There are already several ways to run retro games on development boards, with for example RetroPie, and derivatives like RetrOrangePi, Lakka and Recalbox. Batocera.Linux is another option that I had never heard about so far, and works on PCs, as well as Raspberry Pi and ODROID boards, with ODROID-N2 support having been added very recently. batocera.linux operating system can easily be run from a USB flash drive on your computer without altering your existing OS, while it will boot from a standard microSD card on Raspberry Pi and ODROID boards. Beside retro-gaming support, the OS also includes Kodi media center for playing videos, or listening to music. You may even play games in it since retro-gaming support was added in Kodi 18. The partial compatibility table above shows all platforms have a different level of support, and for Intel hardware support more emulators than Arm based boards. The Orange arrow […]

TB-96AI & TB-96AIoT are the First 96Boards Systems-on-Module

96Boards SoM Carrier Board

First introduced in 2015, 96boards specifications define mechanical, electrical, and software specifications for single board computers, but in 2017 Linaro asked companies to provide some feedback on what they’d like for a 96boards system-on-module standard. And for the first day of Linaro Connect Bangkok 2019, the 96Boards SoM specifications have now been announced, together with the introduction of Rockchip RK3399Pro powered TB-96AI and Rockchip RK1808 based TB-96AIoT, the first compliant 96Boards SoMs, and corresponding 96Boards SoM Carrier Board. 96Boards System-on-Module Specifications Two 96Boards SoM specifications have been unveiled with the Compute Module Specification and the Wireless Specification. The 96boards Compute Module Specification defines a SoM with up to four 100-pin connectors, but only one is mandatory (X1), and two form factors are specified: SOM-CA (85 x 50 mm) and SOM-CB (50 x 50 mm). List of signals associated to each connectors: X1 – SoM managements, 1x UART, 2x I2C, 1x […]

PINE64 Plans to Move their Website on a 24-node RockPro64 Cluster

24-node RockPro64 Cluster

Boards’ clusters are always fun to see, and PINE64 has shared pictures of two RockPro64 clusters with respectively 48 and 24 boards neatly packed into  partially custom enclosures. The  48-node cluster will feature a total of 288 cores, including 96 Arm Cortex-A72 cores and 188 Cortex-A53 cores, as well as 192GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Low cost development boards may be seen as toys by some, so it’s interesting to learn that PINE64 plans to move their complete website infrastructure including the main website, a community website, forums, wiki, and possibly IRC on the 24-node cluster, while it seems the 48-node cluster may be used for their build environment. The company has just completed the assembly of the clusters, and did not disclose the full technical details just yet. However, a progress report may be written in due time. Once the migration is done, and everything works as it should, it […]

Linux 5.0 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.0 Changelog

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.0: Ok, so the last week of the 5.0 release wasn’t entirely quiet, but it’s a lot smaller than rc8 was, and on the whole I’m happy that I delayed a week and did an rc8. It turns out that the actual patch that I talked about in the rc8 release wasn’t the worrisome bug I had thought: yes, we had an uninitialized variable, but the reason we hadn’t immediately noticed it due to a warning was that the way gcc works, the compiler had basically initialized it for us to the right value. So the same thing that caused not the lack of warning, also effectively meant that the fix was a no-op in practice. But hey, we had other bug fixes come in that actually did matter, and the uninitialized variable _could_ have been a problem with another compiler. Regardless – all […]

Orange Pi Software Releases – Android 9.0 Firmware, Linux Source Code for RK3399 / MT6737

Orange Pi One Plus Android 9.0

Shenzhen Xunlong Software is used to release many different variations of their Orange Pi boards, and more often than not they tend to launch their boards fairly early before the software is fully ready. Many of their boards get supported by the community thanks to Armbian, linux-sunxi, etc… but sometimes the company does release firmware or source code themselves, as they did in the last two days with Android 9.0 firmware for one of their Allwinner H6 board, and Linux source code for Orange Pi 4G-IoT and Orange Pi RK3399. Android 9.0 for Orange Pi One Plus Launched in 2017, Orange Pi One Plus was the very first Allwinner H6 SBC launched on the market, and supported Android 7.0 at the time.  But following the release of Android 9.0 for Allwinner H6 TV boxes a few weeks ago,  you can now also upgrade your Orange Pi One Plus to Android […]

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