gaming News - Page 7 of 20 - CNX Software

March 2, 2022March 7, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

MediaTek Dimensity 8000/8100 Cortex-A78/A55 processor to power premium 5G smartphones

MediaTek Dimensity 8000/8100 Arm Cortex-A78 processors for 5G premium smartphones bring many of the features of the flagship Dimensity 9000 Armv9 processor announced last December, but at a more affordable price point. Designed for gamers, the Dimensity 8100 integrates four Arm Cortex-A78 cores with speeds reaching 2.85GHz instead of 2.75GHz for the Dimenssity 8000, and boosts GPU and AI engine’s frequencies to 20% and 25% respectively. MediaTek Dimensity 8000/8100 specifications: Octa-core CPU subsystem 4x Arm Cortex-A78 up to 2.75 GHz (Dimensity 8000) / 2.85 GHz (Dimensity 8100) 4x Arm Cortex-A55 up to 2.0 GHz 4MB L3 cache GPU – Arm Mali-G610 MC6 GPU (Dimensity 8100 with 20% frequency boost) with MediaTek HyperEngine 5.0 gaming technologies AI Accelerator – 5th generation MediaTek APU 580 (Dimensity 8100 with 25% frequency boost) Memory I/IF – LPDDR5 6400 Mbps Storage I/F – UFS 3.1 Display Dimensity 8000 – 168Hz Full HD+ Dimensity 8100 – 120Hz […]

February 17, 2022June 10, 2023 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 12 Comments

Beelink GTR5 Review – An AMD Ryzen 9 mini PC tested with Windows 11, Ubuntu 20.04

Beelink’s GTR5 is their most powerful mini PC to date and has been released as part of their ‘GT’ series of slightly larger mini PCs that are notable for expandable storage configurations together with multiple ports and characterized by the inclusion of a fingerprint scanner. Featuring an AMD Ryzen 9 mobile processor with Radeon Graphics, Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows and Ubuntu. Hardware Overview The Beelink GTR5 physically consists of a 168 x 120 x 39mm (6.61 x 4.72 x 1.54 inches) rectangular metal case. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses AMD’s ‘Zen 3’ Ryzen 9 5900HX processor which is an eight-core 16-thread 3.3 GHz mobile processor boosting up to 4.6 GHz together with Radeon Graphics. The front panel has an illuminated power button, a ‘CLR CMOS’ button, a USB 3.1 port, a Type-C USB 3.1 port, and a […]

January 18, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Samsung Exynos 2200 SoC features Xclipse 920 GPU with AMD RDNA 2 architecture

Samsung has just unveiled the Exynos 2200 Armv9 SoC equipped with Samsung Xplipse 920 GPU based on AMD RDNA architecture and promising console quality graphics on mobile devices. Manufactured with a 4nm process, the octa-core processor also features Arm Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, and Cortex-A510 cores, a 5G modem for up to 7.35 Gbps downlink, 8K video encoding and decoding, as well as support for LPDDR5 memory and UFS 3.1 storage. Exynos 2200 specifications: CPU 1x Arm Cortex-X2 3x Arm Cortex-A710 4x Arm Cortex-A510 GPU – Samsung Xclipse 920 GPU built with AMD RDNA 2 technology enabling hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS), a first on mobile according to Samsung VPU Video decode – 8Kp60 10-bit HEVC (H.265), 8Kp30 10-bit VP9, AV1 Video encode – 8Kp30 10-bit HEVC(H.265), VP9 AI – AI Engine with Dual-core NPU and DSP up to 52 TOPS (TBC) Memory – LPDDR5 Storage – UFS […]

January 17, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

TinyNES – An open-source game console features original or cloned Ricoh RP2A03 & RP2C02 chips (Crowdfunding)

TinyNES open-source hardware NES game console

Tall Dog Electronics’ TinyNES (Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square) is an open-source hardware game console compatible with NES cartridges and featuring the original MOS 6502-based Ricoh RP2A03 CPU (central processing unit) and the Ricoh RP2C02 PPU (picture processing unit) found in the Nintendo NES, although clones may be also used in the future due to the lack of availability. Designed to offer the same experience as the original Nintendo NES, the console comes with two NES controller ports, a cartridge slot, RCA video composite and mono audio outputs, and all electronics is housed in an FR-4 enclosure, the same material used for most PCBs. TinyNES specifications: CPU – MOS 6502-based Ricoh RP2A03 central processing unit, or UMC UA6527 clone PPU – Ricoh RP2C02 picture processing unit, or UMC UA6528 clone Cartridge slot for NES cartridges Controller ports – 2 original NES-style 7-pin controller ports Video – NTSC composite (CVBS) analog […]

January 10, 2022February 1, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 5.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.16: Not a lot here since -rc8, which is not unexpected. We had that extra week due to the holidays, and it’s not like we had lots of last-minute things that needed to be sorted out. So this mainly contains some driver fixes (mainly networking and rdma), a cgroup credential use fix, a few core networking fixes, a couple of last-minute reverts, and some other random noise. The appended shortlog is so small that you might as well scroll through it. This obviously means that the merge window for 5.17 opens tomorrow, and I’m happy to say I already have several pending early pull requests. I wish I had even more, because this merge window is going to be somewhat painful due to unfortunate travel for family reasons. So I’ll be doing most of it on the road on a laptop […]

December 29, 2021December 31, 2021 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 22 Comments

OS and Memory Impact on Mini PC Gaming Performance

This article looks at what the effect of running a different operating system or having more memory has on similarly spec’d Intel and AMD mini PCs when gaming. Note: This article has been updated and corrected as a result of reader feedback and additional testing. It was inspired by having built and tested a pseudo ‘Steamdeck’ running Manjaro on an AMD-based mini PC with 16GB of memory, which made me wonder what the performance would be like using Windows 11. Initial results were surprising because Windows appeared much slower. As I’d previously heard of performance improvements when using 64GB of memory I swapped out the currently installed 16GB memory and immediately saw improved results. As I’d never observed such a dramatic performance increase on Intel mini PCs just through increasing the memory I decided to explore further by testing gaming performance on similar Intel and AMD mini PCs when using […]

December 26, 2021February 4, 2022 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 4 Comments

Beelink GTi11 review – Part 2: Ubuntu 20.04 on an Intel Core i5-1135G7 mini PC

Previously I reviewed Beelink’s new GTi11 Intel Tiger Lake mini PC running Windows 11, so in this part, I will cover Ubuntu 20.04. Hardware Recap The GTi11 is a 168 x 120 x 39mm (6.61 x 4.72 x 1.54 inches) actively cooled mini PC and the review model has an i5-1135G7 Intel Tiger Lake quad-core 8-thread 2.50 GHz Core processor boosting to 4.20 GHz with Intel’s Xe Graphics. The review model also includes a 500GB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 SSD drive initially with Windows 10 Pro installed but now successfully upgraded to Windows 11 Pro, two sticks of 8GB DDR4 3200 MHz memory, a soldered WiFi 6 (or 802.11ax) Intel AX201 chip and dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports. The specifications list four of the USB ports as 3.0 so I retested them on Ubuntu using a Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD housed in an ‘USB to […]

December 3, 2021December 24, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Portable game console runs RetroArch on SigmaStar SSD202D processor

SigmaStar SSD202D “Smart Display” dual-core Cortex-A7 processor has found its way into the MIYOO mini portable game console compatible with RetroArch Linux distribution. Initially designed for industrial smart displays or other HMI applications, we’ve already seen the low-cost Arm Linux processor with 64MB (SSD201) or 128MB (SSD202D) memory has been integrated into a gateway, a single board computer, and M5Stack UnitV2 AI camera devkit, but somehow, it’s now gone into a consumer device. MIYOO mini portable game console specifications: SoC – SigmaStar SSD202D dual-core Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.2 GHz with 2D GPU, 128MB DDR3 (Note: no GPU) Storage – 32GB MicroSD card Display – 2.8-inch IPS screen with 640×480 resolution Audio – 3.5mm audio jack User input – D-PAD, Menu, Select and Start buttons, ABXY buttons, R/R2 and L/L2 buttons at the back USB – 1x USB-C port Misc – Power button, Vibration motor, LEDs Battery – 3.7V/1,900mAh battery good […]