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October 3, 2022October 3, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linux 6.0 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.0 has just been released by Linus Torvalds: So, as is hopefully clear to everybody, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any big fundamental changes. But of course there’s a lot of various changes in 6.0 – we’ve got over 15k non-merge commits in there in total, after all, and as such 6.0 is one of the bigger releases at least in numbers of commits in a while. The shortlog of changes below is only the last week since 6.0-rc7. A little bit of everything, although the diffstat is dominated by drm (mostly amd new chip support) and networking drivers. And this obviously means that tomorrow I’ll open the merge window for 6.1. Which – unlike 6.0 – has a number of fairly core new things lined up. But for now, please do give this most […]

May 23, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 5.18 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.18 is out! Linus Torvalds has just announced the release on lkml: No unexpected nasty surprises this last week, so here we go with the 5.18 release right on schedule. That obviously means that the merge window for 5.19 will open tomorrow, and I already have a few pull requests pending. Thank you everybody. I’d still like people to run boring old plain 5.18 just to check, before we start with the excitement of all the new features for the merge window. The full shortlog for the last week is below, and nothing really odd stands out. The diffstat looks a bit funny – unusually we have parsic architecture patches being a big part of it due to some last-minute cache flushing fixes, but that is probably more indicative of everything else being pretty small. So outside of the parisc fixes, there’s random driver updates (mellanox mlx5 stands out, […]

May 6, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series processors target Chrome OS devices for work

AMD has just introduced the 15W Ryzen 5000 C-Series “Zen 3” processors for premium Chrome OS devices designed for work and collaboration. The processors can with up to eight cores and sixteen threads and are said to offer all-day battery life. AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series processors for Chrome OS are expected to offer up to 67% faster responsiveness and up to 85% better graphics performance when comparing a Chromebook based on AMD Ryzen 7 5825C against an earlier model based on AMD Ryzen 7 3700C introduced in 2020 using respectively WebXPRT 3 and Motion Mark 1.2 benchmarks. Multitasking performance comparison using Geekbench 5 shows a 107% improvement that is probably mostly due to the doubling of the number of cores. The AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series “”Barcelo” family is currently comprised of four parts. We can look at the Ryzen 7 5825C other features for more details: Cache – 512KB L1 […]

February 11, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Android 13 developer preview released with privacy, security, and productivity improvements

Android 12 was only released in October 2021 and Google has already released the first developer preview of Android 13 with better privacy and security, efforts to improve developer productivity, and more work on better support for larger screens like tablets or Chromebooks building on the work done on Android 12L. Android 13 privacy and security features Google announces two new features related to privacy and security: Photo picker and APIs – Android 13 adds a system photo picker to share both local and cloud-based photos securely. Apps can use the photo picker APIs to access shared photos and videos without needing permission to view all media files on the device. So if an app just needs to access photos or videos, there’s no need to request full storage access. The photo picker will also be brought to through Google Play system updates on devices running Android 11 and higher, […]

February 11, 2022February 11, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Low-power Alder Lake-N processors coming to Chromebooks, embedded systems

Intel Alder Lake-N processors succeeding Jasper Lake processors are likely to soon show up in Chromebooks and embedded systems with early clues about the features of the upcoming processors found in the source tree of Coreboot and the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) Project. The person or team at Coelacanth’s dream has been analyzing the commits related to Alder Lake-N and found some interesting information related to the CPU cores, GPU, media capabilities, and peripherals, plus some reference boards by the Google Chromium team. Their latest update analyzes a partial boot log in the SOF Project and so far we know that: Alder Lake-N is an Atom-only “Gracemont” processor (no hybrid variant like Alder Lake-S desktop processors) with up to 8 threads/8 cores Alder Lake-N has two 4-core clusters that share the L2 cache The new processors should come with Intel UHD Gen12 graphics just like Alder Lake-P/M mobile processors, but […]

January 28, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

MediaTek Kompanio 1380 Cortex-A78/55 processor is designed for premium Chromebooks

MediaTek Kompanio 1380 is a 6nm octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 processor clocked at up to 3.0 GHz designed for premium Chromebooks such as the new Acer Chromebook Spin 513 (CP513-2H), which will compete against the company’s Snapdragon 7c based Chromebook Spin 513 (CP513-1H). The processor supports LPDDR4x memory, UFS and eMMC storage, up to three displays, for example, the main display plus two external HDMI displays, WiFI 6/6E, and offers high-performance interfaces such as PCIe Gen 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 1. MediaTek Kompanio 1380 (MT8195T) processor specifications: Octa-core CPU 4x Arm Cortex-A78 cores @ up to 3.0 GHz 4x Arm Cortex-A55 cores @ up to 2.0 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G57 MC5 AI accelerator – MediaTek APU 3.0 up to 4 TOPS VPU Video Playback – 4K HDR H.264, H.265 / HEVC, VP9, AV1 Video Encoding – 4K HDR H.264, H.265 / HEVC Memory – LPDDR4x @ 2133 MHz Storage – […]

December 2, 2021December 2, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Qualcomm unveils third generation Snapdragon 8cx and 7c+ compute platforms

Qualcomm has introduced the third generation of the Snapdragon 8cx and 7c compute platforms with the high-end 5nm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor offers up to 85% faster CPU and 60% faster GPU performance compared to Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, while the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3, designed for entry-level and mid-range laptops and Chromebooks, is said to gain up to 60% CPU performance and achieve up to 70% faster GPU performance uplift compared to the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2. Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx specifications: CPU – Qualcomm Kryo 64-bit CPU. Details based on Anandtech live blog from the Snapdragon Tech Summit: 4x 3.0 GHz Prime cores 4x 2.4 GHz Efficiency Cores 14MB Total Cache (8MB L3+6MB System cache) Performance: +40% for single-thread, +85% for multi-thread GPU – Unnamed Adreno GPU with DirectX 12 (DX12) API support DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, Qualcomm Sensing Hub AI – Qualcomm […]

May 25, 2021May 25, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoC for laptops and Chromebooks

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoC for entry-level laptops and Chromebooks follows the steps of the Snapdragon 7c processor with a slightly higher frequency for the Kryo 468 cores, leading to a 6% performance improvements. As we’ll see below, most of the specifications are exactly the same, except the built-in Snapdragon X15 LTE modem is now listed as supporting LTE Cat 14 up to 600 Mbps, instead of LTE Cat 15 up to 800 Mbps, and UFS downgraded to UFS 2.1 from UFS 3.0. Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 specifications: CPU – Octa-core Kryo 468 (Cortex-A76) processor up to 2.55 GHz GPU – Unnamed Qualcomm Adreno GPU (Note: Snapdragon 7c had Qualcomm Adreno 618 GPU) DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon 692 DSP Memory – 2x 16-bit LPDDR4x-4266 Storage – eMMC 5.1, UFS 2.1 Display On-device display up to QXGA (2048 x 1536) @ 60 Hz External display up to QHD (2560×1440) @ […]