Samsung Announces Exynos 5430 SoC, Manufactured with 20nm Process

Samsung already have a few octa-core big.LITTLE SoCs part of Exynos 5 Octa family with Exynos 5410, Exynos 5420, and Exynos 5422/5800, all based on 28nm process. The company has just announced a new Exynos 5 Octa processors with Exynos 5430, but this time manufactured using 20nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology providing 25% less power consumption compared to 28nm Exynos SoCs. Exynos 5430 SoC will feature four ARM Cortex A15 cores at 1.8 GHz, four Cortex A7 cores at 1.3 GHz, supports WQHD (2560×1440) and WQXGA (2560 x 1600) displays using hibernation display and Mobile Image compression (MIC) in order to lower power consumption. It also said to support HDMI, come with a Multi Format Codec (MFC) supporting HEVC/H.265 decoding, as well as an enhanced dual ISP, and up to 17GB/s of memory bandwidth. That’s about all the information I could get at this point. The CPU core […]

Linux 3.16 Released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.16 over the week-end: So nothing particularly exciting happened this week, and 3.16 is out there. And as usual (previous release being the exception) that means that the merge window for 3.17 is obviously open. And for the third time in a row, the timing sucks for me, as I have travel coming up the second week of the merge window. Many other core developers will be traveling too, since it’s just before the kernel summit in Chicago. So we’ll see how the next merge window goes, but I’m not going to worry about it overmuch. If I end up not having time to do all the merges, I might delay things into the week of the kernel summit, but I’ll hope to get most of the big merging done this upcoming week before any travel takes place, so maybe it won’t come […]

Linaro 14.07 Release with Linux Kernel 3.16 and Android 4.4

Linaro 14.07 has just been released with Linux Kernel 3.16-rc6 (baseline), Linux Kernel 3.10.50 (LSK), and Android 4.4.4. This month, Linaro has continued development on Juno 64-bit ARM development board, as well as other member boards from Broadcom (Capri), Qualcomm (IFC6410), Hisilicon D01, Samsung (Arndale / Arndale Octa), etc.. Android have been upgraded to version 4.4.4 with images released for Pandaboard, Arndale, Nexus 10, and Nexus 7, built with Linaro GCC 4.9. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.16-rc6-2014.07 released GATOR version 5.18 (same version as in 2014.04) updated basic Capri board support from Broadcom LT. Good progress in upstreaming the code: now the topic has 21 patch on top of v3.16-rc4 vs 53 patches on top of v3.15 in 2014.06 cycle removed cortex-strings-arm64 topic as the code is accepted into the mainline new topic from Qualcomm LT to add IFC6410 board support updated Versatile Express ARM64 […]

Hardkernel Unveils $179 ODROID-XU3 Development Board Powered by Samsung Exynos 5422 SoC

Remember ODROID-XU2 development board based on Exynos 5420? The bad news is that it apparently got scrapped, but the good news is that it gave birth to ODROID-XU3 development board powered by the latest Samsung Exynos 5422 octa core big.LITTLE SoC with support for Ubuntu 14.04 and Android 4.4, including GPU 3D acceleration with the company promising a full desktop experience in Ubuntu. ODROID-XU3 specifications: SoC – Samsung Exynos 5422 quad core ARM Cortex-A15 @ 2.0GHz+ quad core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1.4GHz with Mali-T628 MP6 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.0 / 2.0 / 1.1 and OpenCL 1.1 Full profile System Memory – 2GB LPDDR3 RAM PoP (933Mhz, 14.9GB/s memory bandwidth, 2x32bit bus) Storage – Micro SD slot (up to 64GB) + eMMC 5.0 module socket (16, 32, or 64GB module available) Video Output – micro HDMI (Up to 1080p) and DisplayPort (up to 2160p) Audio Output – micro HDMI and […]

Google Releases Android Wear SDK, LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live Smartwatches Are Now Available

I’ve just covered what’s new in Android L?, and I’m going to focus on Google I/O 2014’s announcements related by Android wear starting with hardware with LG G Watch ,and Samsung Gear smartwatches, followed by some details about the first official release of Android Wear SDK. LG G Watch Specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 @ 1.2 GHz System Memory – 512MB RAM Storage – 4GB eMMC Display – 1.65” IPS display (280 x 280) Connectivity – Bluetooth 4.0 LE Sensors – 9-Axis (Gyro / Accelerometer / Compass) IP Rating – IP67 dust and water resistant Battery – Li-ion 400mAh Dimensions – 37.9 x 46.5 x 9.95 mm Weight – 62.5 grams LG G watch will run Android Wear (as it’s the subject of this post), and it currently available on Google Play for $229 (US only?) with shipping scheduled for early July. Samsung Gear Live Specifications: Processor – Unnamed […]

Linux 3.15 Released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.15 last Sunday: So I ended up doing an rc8 because I was a bit worried about some last-minute dcache fixes, but it turns out that nobody seemed to even notice those. We did have other issues during the week, though, so it was just as well. The futex fixes and cleanups may stand out, but as usual there’s various other random fixes since rc8 in there too: mainly drivers (drm, networking, sound, usb etc), networking, scheduling and perf tooling. But it’s all been fairly small and quiet, which *may* of course be due to the fact that last week was also the first week of the merge window for 3.16. That might have distracted some developers. I’m not entirely convinced I liked the overlap, but it seemed to work ok, and unless people scream really loudly (“Please don’t _ever_ do that again”) and give good […]

First Tizen 3.0 Common Milestone Released, Developer Program Announced

The Tizen Steering Group has announced the first release of Tizen 3.0 Common. Tizen Common is the common subset of development / build / test platform of the Tizen profiles, used by platform developers to develop the next version of the profiles, and a Tizen 3.0 common release is planned every quarter. This milestone release includes: 64-bit support for both Intel and ARM architectures Crosswalk-based web runtime Multiuser support Systemd Security: three-domain rule system for SMACK and Cynara as authorization framework Wayland display server Pre-built binary releases for can be downloaded @ http://download.tizen.org/releases/daily/tizen/common/common-wayland-x86_64/tizen_20140602.26/ for Intel Atom 3815 NUC Kit and NEXCOM VTC1010 in-vehicle computer based on Intel Atom 3825. However, Tizen 3.0 Common will also be tested on Intel NUC Haswell (core i5),  Lenovo x230 IvyBridge (core i5) and on the ARM side, ODROID-U3 development board. If you want to build your own, refer to the developer guide, using tizen_common_2014.Q2 tag. More details can be found […]

Linaro 14.05 Released with Linux Kernel 3.15, Android 4.4.2, and Ubuntu Trusty

Linaro 14.05 has been released with Linux Kernel 3.15-rc5 (baseline), Linux Kernel 3.10.40 (LSK), Android 4.4.2, and Ubuntu has been switched from Saucy to Trusty. More work has been done on big.LITTLE processing and ARMv8 support with notably completing bootstrapping with Debian 64-bit. New hardware platform have started to pop-up such as TI J6-Vayu which must be an evaluation board for Texas Instruments Jacinto 6 dual core Cortex A15 SoC for automotive application, as well as IFC6410, a Snapdragon 600 development board which got a Ubuntu LEB image. This month also marks the first release of Linaro GCC 4.9 toolchain. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.15-rc5-2014.05 new Android topic (linaro-android-3.15-experimental) uses the resent AOSP code base GATOR version 5.18 (same version as in 2014.04) uprobes topic removed as all patches have been accepted into mainline updated big-LITTLE-pmu topic from ARM LT updated basic Capri board support […]

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