arm News - Page 21 of 90 - CNX Software

March 21, 2022March 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 5.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.17: So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good. And that calm last week can very much be seen from the appended shortlog – there really aren’t a lot of commits in here, and it’s all pretty small. Most of it is in drivers (net, usb, drm), with some core networking, and some tooling updates too. It really is small enough that you can just scroll through the details below, and the one-liner summaries will give a good flavor of what happened last week. Of course, this means […]

March 10, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Picovoice on-device speech-to-text engines slash the requirements and cost of transcription

Picovoice Leopard and Cheetah offline, on-device speech-to-text engines are said to achieve cloud-level accuracy, rely on tiny Speech-to-Text models, and slash the cost of automatic transcription by up to 10 times. Leopard is an on-device speech-to-text engine, while Cheetah is an on-device streaming speech-to-text engine, and both are cross-platform with support for Linux x86_64, macOS (x86_64, arm64), Windows x86_64, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi 3/4, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Looking at the cost is always tricky since companies have different pricing structures, and the table above basically shows the best scenario, where Picovoice is 6 to 20 times more cost-effective than solutions from Microsoft Azure or Google STT. Picovoice Leopard/Cheetah is free for the first 100 hours, and customers can pay a monthly $999 fee for up to 10,000 hours hence the $0.1 per hour cost with PicoVoice. If you were to use only 1000 hours out of your plan that […]

March 3, 2022March 3, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) open standard for Chiplets with heterogeneous chips

We first heard about Chiplet, chips that gather IP or chips from different vendors into a single chip, in 2020 with the now-defunct zGlue’s Open Chiplet Initiative, but the term recently came back to the forefront last month with Intel’s investment into the “Open Chiplet Platform” that aims to offer a modular approach to chip design through chiplets with each block/chiplet customized for a particular function. It turns out there’s now an official standard called the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) whose specification defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, and not only backed by Intel, but also AMD, Arm, ASE, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC. UCIe defines the Physical Layer (Die-to-Die I/O) and protocols to be used for the chiplet interfaces, currently PCIe and CXL (Compute Express Link), but more protocols will be added to the specification in the future. The goal is to provide […]

February 21, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Low-power satellite IoT SoC works with Totum’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network

Orca Systems ORC3990 is a low-power satellite Internet of Things (IoT) SoC that works with Totum’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network of satellites and targets outdoor and indoor tracking and monitoring applications. It’s not the first time we read about satellites being used for LPWAN networks, as Sigfox launched LEO satellites a few years ago to provide worldwide coverage even in remote locations like the Sahara desert, the two poles, and oceans. But I had never heard of Totum or Orca Systems before, so let’s have a closer look. Orca Systems ORC3990 ORC3990 specifications: Unnamed Arm cores Integrated RF Transceiver Low Power Sensor-to-Satellite (LP-S2S) connectivity in the 2.4 GHz ISM band Totum DMSS modem for improved doppler performance Link budget enables indoor signal coverage Support location fixes with 20m accuracy Low power – 10+ year battery life Package – 7x7mm QFN chip Temperature Range – -40 – +85°C Process – […]

February 18, 2022February 24, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

HC32L110 Arm Cortex-M0+ MCU is available in a tiny 1.59 x 1.436 mm CSP16 package

Before you ask… No, it’s not another one of those CNXSoft’s typos, I did not mean to write cm (centimeters), and HDSC HC32L110 is indeed an Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller available in an almost microscopic 1.59 x 1.436 mm CSP16 package, which could make it the world’s smallest Arm MCU. I discovered the microcontroller when LilyGO shared a small board only showing the MCU’s dimensions and CSP16 type. Silicon Labs EFM8SB10F8G-CSP16 showed first in a web search, but that’s an 8-bit 8051 microcontroller with a 1.781 x 1.659 mm CSP16 package, and it’s unlikely they’d use a “Western” microcontroller. But I soon found the microcontroller on Huada Semiconductor Co. Ltd (HDSC) website. HC32L110 specifications: MCU core – Arm Cortex-M0+ 32-bit core @ up to 32 MHz Memory – 2KB to 4KB RAM memory with parity check Storage – 16K to 32KB flash memory with erase and write protection Peripherals 16x GPIOs […]

February 13, 2022February 17, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

RISC-V or Arm? This tiny 4x4cm Linux board with WiFi offers both options

Last fall, we wrote about Allwinner D1s/F133-A RISC-V processor and the upcoming MangoPi MQ1, a tiny 4x4cm board based on the processor. The board is not for sale, but we have more details, and the company is also working on an Arm version equipped with Allwinner T113-S3 dual-core Cortex-A7 processor that is pin-to-pin compatible with F133-A SoC. The Allwinner F133-A board will finally be called MangoPi Nezha-MQ, or MangoPi MQ for shorts, and come with 64MB on-chip RAM while the Allwinner T113-S3 board, with 128MB on-chip RAM, will be named MangoPi MQ-Dual. Both are fitted with a Realtek RTL8189-based Wi-Fi module, offer display and camera interfaces, two USB-C interfaces, and headers for GPIOs. MangoPi MQ RISC-V or Arm Linux board MangoPi MQ/MQ-Dual specifications: SoC (one or the other) MangoPi MQ – Allwinner D1s/F133-A 64-bit RISC-V processor @ 1 GHz with 64 MB DDR2 MangoPi MQ-Dual – Allwinner T113-S3 32-bit dual-core […]

February 8, 2022February 9, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Intel to invest $1 billion in foundry innovation, becomes RISC-V International member

Intel has just announced a $1 billion fund to support companies bringing innovations and new technologies to the foundry ecosystem. The company says the fund will prioritize investments in “capabilities that accelerate foundry customers’ time to market – spanning intellectual property (IP), software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies.” What’s interesting is that it does not only cover x86 architecture but also Arm and RISC-V, with a focus on the latter, as Intel has just become a Premier member of RISC-V International, and partnered with several companies offering RISC-V solutions including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive, and Ventana Micro Systems. Intel’s Open Chiplet Platform Part of the investment will go to the Open Chiplet Platform offering a modular approach to chip design through chiplets with each block/chiplet customized for a particular function. This will allow designers to select the best IP and process technologies for a particular SoC. […]

January 28, 2022January 28, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Speeding up open-source GPU driver development with unit tests, drm-shim, and code reuse

Getting an Arm platform that works with mainline Linux may take several years as the work is often done by third parties, and the silicon vendor has its own Linux tree. That means in many cases, the software is ready when the platform is obsolete or soon will be. It would be nice to start software development before the hardware is ready. It may seem like a crazy idea, but that’s what the team at Collabora has done to add support for Arm “Valhall” GPUs (Mali-G57, Mali-G78) to the Panfrost open-source GPU driver. The result is that it only took the team a few days to successfully pass tests using data structures prepared by their Mesa driver and shaders compiled by their Valhall compiler after receiving the actual hardware thanks to the work done in the last six months. So how did they achieve this feat exactly? We have to […]