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August 11, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

CrowPi L Review – Part 2: Learn programming and electronics with a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop

CrowPi L review learn programming electronics

In the first part of our review of CrowPi L Raspberry Pi 4 laptop for education, we checked the hardware and accessories such as the CrowTail starter kit with various sensors and other electronics modules, and showed how to install or remove the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC from the laptop shell. I’ve now had more time to play with the educational software, so I’ll report my experience with the laptop when learning game design and hardware control with Letscode visual programming IDE, as well as the Python lessons for more advanced students. Reinstalling CrowPi OS image It’s the rainy season here in Thailand meaning it’s both hot and humid, and even though I’m not entirely sure it’s related, I recently had to reinstall Raspberry Pi OS on one of my Raspberry Pi with a corrupted SD card. It happened again with the CrowPi L after I left it in its […]

July 19, 2022August 11, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

CrowPi L Raspberry Pi 4 laptop review – Part 1: Unboxing and teardown

CrowPi L Raspberry Pi Education Laptop Review

Elecrow CrowPi L is an 11.6-inch laptop shell based on Raspberry Pi 4 designed for STEM education with optional electronics modules and tutorials. That’s an evolution of the CrowPi 2 laptop I reviewed in 2020 with a thinner design and more flexible since the electronics modules are optional, so it can serve the market of people just wanting a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop. The company has sent me a full “CrowPi L Advanced Kit” for review with the CrowPi L laptop fitted with a Raspberry Pi 4, as well as the Crowtail Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi. CrowPi L Advanced Kit Unboxing Let’s check out the laptop package first. Since in this design, the laptop comes with a battery, and mine already had a Raspberry Pi 4 installed, I could just turn it on immediately. Accessories include a wireless mouse, a 12V/2A power supply (with USB Type-C plug… this should […]

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

Intel Meteor Lake mobile processor highlights leaked

Intel Meteor Lake processor family is supposed to succeed the 13th generation Raptor Lake chips itself coming after the current 12th generation Alder lake processors. It is scheduled to launch next year (2023), but we already have some details about the Meteor Lake U, P, and H mobile processors from a leak. Just like most Alder Lake processors, Meteor Lake will be hybrid processors with power and energy-efficient cores, but they’ll also feature new LP E-cores which should stand for “low power efficiency” cores in order to further lower the power consumption while a laptop or mini PC in standby mode. Meteor Lake mobile processors highlights: CPU P cores + E cores + LP-E cores architecture U-series with up to 12 cores P- and H-series up to 14 cores; Up to 6+8 configuration with up to 24MB LLC/core (Note the LP-E cores don’t seem to be part of the main […]

July 2, 2022February 27, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 27 Comments

ROMA Linux laptop to feature quad-core RISC-V SoC, support Web3, NFT, cryptocurrencies, etc…

ROMA is an upcoming Linux laptop equipped with an unnamed quad-core RISC-V processor with GPU and NPU, up to 16GB RAM, 256GB storage, primarily aimed at software developers, and with Web3 technology integration. The ROMA laptop will be born out of the collaboration between DeepComputing working on engineering and Xcalibyte taking care of system tuning, plus PW (assembly), ECP (security), XC (crypto), Rexeen (voice), and the LatticeX Foundation (PoS blockchain, NFT). ROMA laptop preliminary specifications: SoC – Quad-core RISC-V CPU with GPU for graphics, NPU for AI (12nm chip for the Pro model, 28nm chip for the Standard model) System Memory – 16GB LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM Storage – 256GB eMMC flash Security – Arm SC300 security enclave processor Display, keyboard, touchpad I agree that’s a bit light on details. We’re told the laptop will support most Linux operating systems and the company will offer free SoC and SoM upgrades, as well […]

June 29, 2022June 29, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

Arm unveils Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715 Armv9 cores, improves Cortex-A510 efficiency

Besides announcing the new Immortalis-G715, Mali-G715, and Mali-G615 GPUs, Arm has also introduced the second-generation of Armv9 cores with the Cortex-A715 and Cortex-X3 cores with respectively a 20% energy-efficiency improvement (and smaller 5% performance uplift) over the Cortex-A710 core and a 25% peak performance boost against the Cortex-X2 flagship core. The announcement also includes a “refresh” of the Cortex-A510 core announced last year with a 5% improvement in efficiency and the same level of performance. The Cortex-X3 will also be used in (Windows 11) laptop processors with the single-thread performance improved by up to 34% in that case. Armv9 mobile SoC (Total Compute) in 2023 Future Armv9 flagship mobile SoC worked on this year, and released in 2023 should have a combination of Cortex-X3, Cortex-A715, and Cortex-A510 cores, an Immortalis-G715 GPU, a new DSU-110 “DynamIQ Shared Unit” that supports 50% more cores in CPU clusters (or up to 12 cores […]

June 28, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

MNT Pocket Reform 7-inch modular mini laptop takes a range of Arm (and FPGA) modules

MNT Pocket Reform is an open-source hardware mini laptop with a 7-inch Full HD display, an ortholinear mechanical keyboard, and trackball, that follows the path of its older and bigger sibling: the MNT Reform 2 laptop initially launched with an NXP i.MX 8M quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 module. The new laptop will not only support a similar “NXP i.MX 8M Plus” module but also a range of other Arm modules namely an NXP Layerscape LS1028A module with up to 16GB RAM, the Raspberry Pi CM4 module via an adapter, Pine64 SOQuartz (RK3566, up to 8GB RAM), as well as based on AMD Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA for industrial use. MNT Pocket Reform specifications: Available system-on-modules Standard: NXP i.MX 8M Plus quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz with 4 or 8 GB DDR4, Vivante GC7000UL GPU, 2.3 TOPS NPU NXP Layerscape LS1028A dual-core Arm Cortex-A72 with 8 or 16GB DDR4, Vivante GC7000UL GPU Raspberry […]

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

A RISC-V laptop or mini PC with Rockchip RK3588-class performance may be coming soon

Mark Himelstein, Chief Technology Officer, RISC-V International, and Dr. Philipp Tomsich, Chief Technologist & Founder, VRULL GmbH hinted that we may see a RISC-V laptop in 2022 in a presentation entitled “From Technology to Product – Maturing the RISC-V Ecosystem” with one of the slides showing what could be a RISC-V laptop prototype and The Register suspected it might come from the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) since it was planning to build 2,000 RISC-V laptops by the end of 2022. But there’s at least one more potential RISC-V laptop project coming our way with StarFive asking users to fill out a survey about a laptop, mini PC, or development board/SBC based on a RISC-V SoC with performance comparable to Rockchip RK3588 or MediaTek MT8192 octa-core Cortex-A76/Cortex-A55 processors. The hardware and software specifications of the device will depend on the answers to the survey. First, it’s […]

June 17, 2022July 19, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

CrowPi L is a $200 laptop shell for Raspberry Pi 4

Two years ago, we reviewed CrowPi 2 Raspberry Pi 4 laptop designed for STEM education with embedded electronics modules and Letscode software with step-by-step tutorials to learn Scratch and Python programming. I found it quite good, but many people were mostly interested in having a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop, and the price tag was a bit high at the time. That’s probably why Elecrow has now designed for CrowPi L laptop shell for Raspberry Pi 4 based on the CrowPi 2 but without all the electronics modules, and with a built-in battery to operate more like an actual laptop. CrowPi L laptop shell specifications: Compatible SBC’s – Raspberry Pi 4 Model B only Storage – Full-size SD card slot Display – 11.6-inch 1366×768 IPS screen (CrowPi 2 was 1920×1080) Video Output – HDMI output for external monitor Camera – 2MP camera Audio – Built-in microphone and stereo speaker; 3.5mm audio […]