Arm Cortex-A78 CPU core and Mali-G78 GPU were announced in March 2020, and yesterday we covered the first Cortex-A78 processor with MediaTek MT8195 that should feature a Mali-G57 GPU. But today, Samsung has announced the first SoC to combine both Cortex-A78 cores with Mali-G78 GPU. Exynos 1080 octa-core processor also includes a 5G NR modem, supports for LPDDR5 memory, UFS 3.1 storage, and manufactured with a 5nm process. Samsung Exynos 1080 key features and specifications: CPU Single-core Cortex-A78 @ 2.8 GHz Triple-core Cortex-A78 @ 2.6 GHz Quad-core Cortex-A55 @ 2.0 GHz GPU – Mali-G78 MP10 AI Accelerators – Neural processing unit (NPU) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) Memory – LPDDR5 / LPDDR4x Storage – UFS v3.1 Display – WQHD+ @ 90Hz; FHD+ @ 144Hz; HDR10+ Camera – Single-camera Up to 200MP, dual-camera 32MP+32MP Video – 4K 60fps encoding and decoding with HEVC(H.265)/H.264/VP8/VP9 (10-bit only with HEVC & VP9) Connectivity Cellular […]
Linux 5.9 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.9 on lkml: Ok, so I’ll be honest – I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn’t really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It’s just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for. The bulk of this is the networking fixes that I already mentioned as being pending in the rc8 release notes last weekend. In fact, about half the patch (and probably more of the number of commits) is from the networking stuff (both drivers and elsewhere). Outside of that, the most visible thing is a reinstatement of the fbdev amba-clcd driver – that’s a noticeable patch, but it’s basically just mainly a revert. The rest is really really tiny (mostly some other minor driver updates, but some filesystem and architecture fixes […]
Linux 5.8 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS, and RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.8: So I considered making an rc8 all the way to the last minute, but decided it’s not just worth waiting another week when there aren’t any big looming worries around. Because despite the merge window having been very large, there really hasn’t been anything scary going on in the release candidates. Yeah, we had some annoying noise with header file dependencies this week, but that’s not a new annoyance, and it’s also not the kind of subtle bug that keeps me up at night worrying about it. It did reinforce how nice it would be if we had some kind of tooling support to break nasty header file dependencies automatically, but if wishes were horses.. Maybe some day we’ll have some kind of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that can handle all our different architectures and configurations, but right now it’s just a manual […]
Linux 5.7 Released – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures
OK… I’m a bit late on that one. Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.7 last week: So we had a fairly calm last week, with nothing really screaming “let’s delay one more rc”. Knock wood – let’s hope we don’t have anything silly lurking this time, like the last-minute wifi regression we had in 5.6.. But embarrassing regressions last time notwithstanding, it all looks fine. And most of the discussion I’ve seen the last week or two has been about upcoming features, so the merge window is now open and I’ll start processing pull requests tomorrow as usual. But in the meantime, please give this a whirl. We’ve got a lot of changes in 5.7 as usual (all the stats look normal – but “normal” for us obviously pretty big and means “almost 14 thousand non-merge commits all over, from close to two thousand developers”), So the appended shortlog is only […]
Samsung Exynos 880 SoC Targets Mid-Range 5G Smartphones
5G used to be reserved for premium smartphones, but with processors such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G and Huawei/Hisilicon Kirin 820, 5G cellular connectivity is also coming to mid-range smartphones. Samsung Exynos 880 brings another option to the mid-range 5G handsets market. The octa-core Cortex-A77/A55 mobile processor comes with a Mali-G76 GPU, an NPU and a DSP for on-chip AI acceleration, and supports 5G downloads up to 3.55 Gbps, uploads up to 1.38 Gbps. Samsung Exynos 880 specification: CPU – Dual-core Cortex-A77 processor @ 2.0GHz, hexa-core Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G76 MP5 On-Device AI – Neural processing unit (NPU) and digital signal processor (DSP) System Memory Type – LPDDR4x Storage I/F – UFS 2.1, eMMC 5.1 Display – Up to Full HD+ (2520×1080) resolution Camera – Single-camera up to 64MP, Dual-camera up to 20MP+20MP Video – 4K UHD 30fps encoding and decoding with HEVC/H.265, H.264, and VP9 […]
Linux 5.6 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.6 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: So I’ll admit to vacillating between doing this 5.6 release and doing another -rc. This has a bit more changes than I’d like, but they are mostly from davem’s networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It’s just slightly more than I’d have preferred at this stage – not doesn’t really seem worth delaying a release over. So about half the diff from the final week is network driver fixlets, and some minor core networking fixes. Another 20% is tooling – mostly bpf and netfilter selftests (but also some perf work). The rest is “misc” – mostly random drivers (gpio, rdma, input) and DTS files. With a smattering of fixes elsewhere (a couple of afs fixes, some vm fixes, etc). […]
NetBSD 9.0 Released with Aarch64 Support, Arm ServerReady Compatibility
Yesterday, we wrote about Raspberry Pi 4 getting UEFI+ACPI firmware for Arm SSBR compliance allowing the board to run operating systems designed for “Arm ServerReady” servers out of the box. NetBSD 9.0 was just released on February 14, 2020, with support for Aarch64 (64-bit Arm) which had been in the works for a few years, and includes support for “Arm ServerReady” compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA). NetBSD 9.0 main changes related to hardware support: Support for AArch64 (64-bit Armv8-A) machines Compatibility with “Arm ServerReady” compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA) using ACPI. Tested on Amazon Graviton and Graviton2 (including bare metal instances), AMD Opteron A1100, Ampere eMAG 8180, Cavium ThunderX, Marvell ARMADA 8040, QEMU w/ Tianocore EDK2 Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (big.LITTLE) Support for running 32-bit binaries via COMPAT_NETBSD32 on CPUs that support it Single GENERIC64 kernel supports ACPI and device tree based booting Supported SoCs Allwinner A64, H5, H6 Amlogic S905, S805X, S905D, […]
Linux 5.5 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures
Linux 5.5 has just been released by Linus Torvalds: So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter module loading fixes, David didn’t think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it’s really been very quiet indeed – there’s a panfrost driver update too, but again it didn’t really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week. Outside of those, it’s all really tiny, even if some of those tiny changes touched some core files. So despite the slight worry that the holidays might have affected the schedule, 5.5 ended up with the regular rc cadence and is out now. That means that the merge window for 5.6 will open tomorrow, and I already have a couple of pull requests pending. The timing for this next merge window isn’t optimal […]