server News - Page 7 of 26 - CNX Software

January 13, 2020January 13, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

SolidRun Janux GS31 Edge AI Server Combines NXP LX2160A & i.MX 8M SoCs with 128 Gyrfalcon AI Accelerators

SolidRun Janux GS31-Edge AI Inference Server

AI inference used to happen exclusively in powerful servers hosted in the cloud, but in recent years great efforts have been made to move inference at the edge, usually meaning on-device, due to much lower latency, and improved privacy. On-device inference works, but obviously, performance is limited, and on battery-operated devices, one also has to consider power consumption. So for some applications, it makes sense to have a local server with much more processing power than devices, and lower latency than the cloud. That’s exactly the use case SolidRun Janux GS31 Edge AI inference server is trying to target using several NXP processors combined with up to 128 Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur SPR2803 AI accelerators Janux GS31 server specifications: CPU Module – CEx7 LX2160A COM Express module with NXP LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex A72 processor @ 2.0 GHz System Memory – Up to 64GB DDR4 RAM via 2x SO-DIMM sockets “Video” Processors […]

December 4, 2019December 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

ROCK PI N10 RK3399Pro SBC Sells for $99 and up

Rockchip RK3399Pro processor is based on the popular Rockchip RK3399Pro hexa-core Arm Cortex-A72/A53 processor plus an embedded neural processing unit (NPU) delivering up to 3 TOPS for AI acceleration. So far you had to spend over $200 to get either Toybrick RK3399Pro board or 96Boards RK3399Pro development kit to get started with the processor. Some other companies announced their own RK3399Pro SBC such as Pine64 RockPro64-AI, or Khadas Edge board, but those are not available yet. But there’s now a more affordable Rockchip RK3399Pro SBC courtesy of Radxa’s Rock Pi N10 available on Seeed Studio in three variants: $99 model A with 4GB RAM (3GB for CPU/GPU + 1GB for NPU), 16GB eMMC flash $129 model B with 6GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 2GB for NPU), 32GB eMMC flash $169 model C with 8GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 4GB for NPU), 64GB eMMC flash Rock Pi N10 specifications: […]

December 4, 2019December 5, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

AWS EC2 6th Gen Instances are 7x Faster thanks to Graviton 2 Arm Neoverse N1 Custom Processor

Last year Amazon introduced their first 64-bit Arm-based ECS2 “A1” instances which were found to deliver up to 45% cost savings over x86 Instances for the right workloads. A few months ago, AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides a new offering with bare-metal A1 instances, and with re:invent 2019 now taking place the company has unveiled AWS ECS2 6th generation Arm instances (which they did not call A2 instances yet) powered by Graviton 2 processor comprised of custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores and promising up to 7x the performance of the original A1 instances. There will be three types of Graviton2-powered EC2 instances with the d suffix indicating NVMe local storage: M6g and M6gd for General Purpose workloads (application servers, mid-size data stores, microservices, and cluster computing) with 1 to 64 vCPUs and up to 256 GB of memory. C6g and C6gd for Compute-Optimized workloads (high-performance computing, video encoding, gaming, and […]

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Imagination Unveils IMG A-Series GPU Designed For Everything from IoT to Mobile and Server

Imagination Technologies has just launched IMG A-Series GPU which they claim is “The GPU of Everything” and “The fastest GPU IP ever”. IMG A-Series can be customized and scaled for various applications & markets from automotive, AIoT, set-top box, mobile, and server. Compared to the company’s earlier PowerVR 9Series GPU, IMG A-Series GPU delivers 2.5 times more performance, eight times faster AI processor, and 60% less power while running complex content with the same process node, area, and under similar conditions. IMG A-Series GPU supports the latest API standards including OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenCL, and Imagination provides a Unified AI API for use in combination with PowerVR neural network accelerators. It also offers 5x performance density compared to the best current shipping PowerVR devices and supports PVRIC4 lossless or virtually-lossless compression guaranteeing a 50% bandwidth and footprint reduction. The new GPU also leverages HyperLane Technology with up to eight individual, […]

November 21, 2019November 21, 2019 by Siji Sunny - 6 Comments

Zsync HTTP-based File Transfer Utility Transfers Large Files Efficiently

Zsync is an opensource file transfer utility built on top of rsync algorithm. This helps to download partial/differential files over the HTTP protocol. The utility allows downloading only new parts of a file from a centralized location, where the older version of the file is already within your computer. While rsync is for syncing data from one computer to another, zsync allows file distribution, where the file hosted in a server using any web server can be distributed to many and downloaded seamlessly. How it works The command-line utility will do all the differential calculations in the client, instead of doing it in the server as in rsync. Server metadata will be created only once and stored as part of the control file. And rest of the operations and decision making will be handled by the client-side application. This will reduce the huge processing needed on the server-side, even when […]

June 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Xibo Player for Linux Released (Open Source Digital Signage Player)

Xibo is an open source digital signage software comprised of a CMS and a player/client. Xibo CMS has always worked on both Windows and Linux, but in recent years, Xibo Client only worked on Windows, Android, and WebOS with the latter two being paid apps. Many years ago there was a Python-based Xibo player working in Linux but it was abandoned. However, recently the company restarted the development of a Linux player, and I even tried Xibo Player and CMS on MINIX NEO Z83-4U mini PC, but at the time the player was at the alpha stage and not very stable at least with the layout I experimented with. Around two months have passed, and the developers must have worked out the quirks, as Xibo Player for Linux has now been released, and just like the Windows player it’s entirely free to use, and open source (C++ code) under the […]

May 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

NODE Mini Server V2 is a Raspberry Pi Based Storage Server for the Decentralized Web

We’ve previously covered networked hard drive enclosures with Ethernet and/or WiFi running OpenWrt or Ubuntu that allows you to easily and fairly cheaply connect SATA drives to your local network with models such as Blueendless X3. NODE has done something similar with a DIY project featuring a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. NODE Mini Server V2 connects the popular SBC to a 2.5″ SATA hard drive over USB and is designed to build out the physical infrastructure for the decentralized web (e.g. IPFS) that would allow users to replace remote servers with nodes that they themselves own and operate. Having said that nothing would prevent you from using this as a simple NAS although performance will not be as optimal as the aforementioned products due to the lack of SATA or USB 3.0 interface, as well as having “Gigabit” Ethernet limited to 300 Mbps. Having said that the design could […]

April 30, 2019May 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 41 Comments

Giggle Score Says ODROID-N2 Best Value, Raspberry Pi Zero Worst Value

[Update May 7, 2019: Giggle Score has been updated to use 7-zip to benchmark the boards instead of sysbench, and the “best value” rankings are now quite different] People like to compare single board computers, and usually want to have a simple answer as to which is better than the others. But in practice it’s impossible, because the beauty of SBCs is that they are so versatile and can be used in a wide variety of project, and that means in some cases the “best board” may be completely useless to you since it lacks a critical feature and interface for YOUR project be it H.265 video encoding or a MIPI DSI display interface. Still, it’s still always fun to look at benchmark scores and trying to compare SBCs, and for projects that mostly require CPU processing power it may also be useful. Robbie Ferguson has been developing and maintaining […]