An Attempt to Benchmark Entry-level x86 Boards against RK3399 & Exynos Arm Boards

Arm vs Intel C-Ray

Some Arm boards have become quite powerful, while hardware based on low power Intel processor has generally become cheaper with both architectures somewhat converging in terms of performance and price. Piotr Maliński got interested and purchased some low cost (<$150) Intel hardware to compare to mid-range Arm boards, throwing a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ into the mix as well for comparison. Those are the Intel test boards / computers: Qotom motherboard with Intel Atom Z3735F Bay Trail processor, 2GB RAM, 32GB flash – $74 + shipping on Aliexpress Piesia nano ITX board with Intel Celeron N2806 Bay Trail processor, DDR3 SO-DIMM socket, SATA / mSATA interfaces – Piotr found it for around $85 on Aliexpress, but the price now jumped to over $150 plus shipping, which does not make it very attractive Generic thin mini ITX motherboard based on Celeron N3160 “Braswell” processor, DDR3 SO-DIMM socket, SATA / mSATA interfaces. $62.68 […]

ODROID-XU4 and ODROID-XU4Q Boards Going for $49 (Promo)

ODROID XU4 Black Friday

ODROID-XU4, and its fanless ODROID-XU4Q sibling, are neat little single board computer packing lots of power into a small form factor. I tested ODROID-XU4 with Ubuntu 18.04 recently and was relatively impressed by how well it worked considering it’s an Arm platform, as there were still admittedly some limitations. But as they say at $59 a board you can’t beat the price. Except you can actually do, as Hardkernel is offering both ODROID-XU4Q and ODROID-XU4 for just $49 during Black Friday here and there. If you’ve already forgotten about the board it is equipped with a Samsung Exynos 5422 octa-core Cortex A15/A7 processor, 2GB RAM, eMMC module support, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, HDMI 1.4, and more. You can read the full specifications here. The only difference between ODROID-XU4 and ODROID-XU4Q is the latter comes with a large heatsink, while the former is cooled by fan. If you are currently shopping […]

Samsung Exynos 9820 Application Processor Supports 2 Gbps LTE, 8K Videos, UFS 3.0 Storage

Exynos 9820

Samsung has just unveiled a new high-end Exynos processor that comes with an enhanced NPU (Neural Processing Unit), and an LTE Advanced Pro modem supporting 2.0 Gbps downloads. Exynos 9820 is a tri-cluster octa-core processor with two custom Arm cores, two Cortex-A75 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores coupled with an Arm Mali-G76 MP12, and manufactured using Samsung’s latest 8nm LPP FinFET process, which reduces power consumption by up to 10 percent compared to 10nm LPP process. Samsung Exynos 9820 key features and specifications: CPU – Dual-core custom CPU +  dual-core Cortex-A75 + quad-core Cortex-A55 GPU – ARM Mali-G76 MP12 Integrated NPU Memory I/F – LPDDR4x Storage I/F – UFS 3.0, UFS 2.1 Display – WQUXGA (3840×2400), 4K UHD (4096×2160) Cellular Connectivity LTE Modem – LTE-Advanced Pro Cat.20 8CA 2Gbps (DL) / Cat.20 3CA 316Mbps (UL) 4×4 Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO), 256-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), and Enhanced Licensed-Assisted Access (eLAA) technology. Camera […]

Linux 4.19 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

Linux 4.19 Changelog

With Linus Torvalds taking a leave from the Linux kernel project, Greg Kroah-Hartman was the one to release Linux 4.19 last Sunday: Hi everyone! It’s been a long strange journey for this kernel release… While it was not the largest kernel release every by number of commits, it was larger than the last 3 releases, which is a non-trivial thing to do. After the original -rc1 bumps, things settled down on the code side and it looks like stuff came nicely together to make a solid kernel for everyone to use for a while. And given that this is going to be one of the “Long Term” kernels I end up maintaining for a few years, that’s good news for everyone. A small trickle of good bugfixes came in this week, showing that waiting an extra week was a wise choice. However odds are that linux-next is just bursting so […]

Howchip ExSOM-8895 Exynos 8895 Board is Designed for Android Development

Exynos 8895 Board

Howchip has just launched a new Samsung based Android development kit -ExSOM-8895 DVK – powered by an Exynos 8895 system-on-module with 4GB DDR4, and UFS 2.1 storage. as well as featuring a carrier board exposing other interfaces such as mini DP, MIPI display and camera interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, a UFS card reader, and so on. Having a Samsung Exynos 8895 board means we get a fairly powerful development platform, as the processor is found in Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone released last year. ExSOM-8895 DVK specifications: SOC – Samsung Exynos 8895 octa-core processor with four custom ARMv8 “Mongoose M2+” cores, four Cortex-A53 cores (max freq: 2.1GHz), and an Arm Mali-G71 GPU System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4x 1866MHz (POP) Storage – UFS2.1 device (default), micro SD card (SD 3.0) slot, and UFS2.1 card slot, Video Output / Display I/F Mini Display Port 1.2 output 4-lane x 2-ch MIPI DSI connector for WQUXGA […]

Samsung Unveils Exynos Modem 5100 with 5G, 4G, 3G, and 2G Connectivity

5G will start being deployed sometimes next year, and we’ve already seen announcement of several 5G modem chips including Qualcomm Snapdragon X50, Mediatek Helio M70 , and Huawei Balong 5G01. Samsung has now announced their own 5G cellular modem chip with Exynos Modem 5100. Specifications: 5G NR – Sub-6GHz, mmWave Supported Modes (Backward compatibility) 4G – LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD 3G – HSPA, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA 2G – CDMA, GSM/EDGE Downlink Features 8CA (Carrier Aggregation) in 5G NR up to 6 Gbps (mmWave) and up to 2Gbps (Sub-6GHz) 8CA (Carrier Aggregation) in LTE up to 1.6 Gbps 4×4 MIMO FD-MIMO Up to 256-QAM in sub-6GHz Up to 64-QAM in mmWave Uplink Features 2CA (Carrier Aggregation) in 5G NR 2CA (Carrier Aggregation) in LTE Up to 256-QAM in sub-6GHz Up to 64-QAM in mmWave Process – 10nm FinFET Process (10LPP) The Exynos Modem 5100 is compliant with 5G NR (New Radio) standard defined by […]

Linux 4.18 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architecture

Linux Changelog 4.18

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 4.18: One week late(r) and here we are – 4.18 is out there. It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates. Mostly networking, but some vfs race fixes (mentioned in the rc8 announment as “pending”) and a couple of driver fixes (scsi, networking, i2c). Some other minor random things (arm crypto fix, parisc memory ordering fix). Shortlog appended for the (few) details. Some of these I was almost ready to just delay to until the next merge window, but they were marked for stable anyway, so it would just have caused more backporting. The vfs fixes are for old races that  are really hard to hit (which is obviously why they are old and weren’t noticed earlier). Some of them _have_ been seen in real […]

Samsung Galaxy Note9 Launched with Exynos 9810 or Snapdragon 845, 4,000 mAh Battery, S-Pen

Samsung Galaxy Note9

Samsung has just launched a new version of their Galaxy Note smartphone with Samsung Galaxy Note9, and it’s always interesting to check out the specifications and features to see if they’ve brought forward some innovations, beside improved performance and features. Samsung Galaxy Note9 specifications: SoC (one or the other depending on market) Samsung Exynos 9810 octa-core processor with 4x Exynos M3 @ up to 2.7GHz , 4x Arm Cortex A53 cores @ up to 2.8 GHz, Arm Mali-G72MP18 GPU Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 octa-core processor with four Kryo 385 performance cores  @ 2.8GHz, 4x Kryo 385 efficiency cores @ 1.7GHz, Adreno 630 GPU Memory / Storage Options 6GB LPDDR4x, 128GB UFS, microSD slot up to 512GB 8GB LPDDR4x, 512GB UFS, microSD slot up to 512GB Display – 6.4″ Quad HD+ Super AMOLED with 2960×1440 resolution (516ppi). Default is Full HD+, but that can be changed to Quad HD+ in the settings […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC