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October 25, 2014October 25, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

LG NUCLUN Octa-core ARM SoC Powers G3 Screen Smartphone

LG has been making mobile devices since 1997, has entered the smartphone market in 2010, and they’ve now decided to foray into mobile SoC, with their very first SoC being an octa-core Cortex A15/A7 processor called NUCLUN, and found in their latest G3 Screen smartphone running Android 4.4.4. Details about NUCLUN processor are sparse, but the company did provide some specifications for LG G3 Screen smartphone: SoC – LG NUCLUN (LG7111) Octa-Core big.LITTLE processor with four ARM Cortex A15 cores @ 1.5GHz, four ARM Cortex A7 cores @ 1.2GHz. System Memory – 2GB RAM Storage – 32GB eMMC + MicroSD slot Display – 5.9″ Full HD IPS touchscreen Camera – 13MP OIS+ rear camera, 2.1MP front-facing camera Network – LTE-A Cat.6 for up to 225Mbps download speed. Battery – 3,000mAh Dimensions – 157.8x 81.8x 9.5mm Weight – 182g The phone, also codenamed as LG Liger F490L, F490K or F490S (depending […]

October 15, 2014October 15, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

ICube MVP SoCs Combine CPU and GPU into a Single Unified Processing Unit (UPU)

ICube is a fabless semiconductor company developing SoCs featuring a Unified Processing Unit (UPU) that takes care of the tasks usually handle by separate CPU and GPU on typical SoCs. The UPUs are based on MVP (Multi-thread Virtual Pipeline) instruction set architecture, and are themselves called MVP cores. The company has now two SoCs based on UPU MVP cores: IC3128 and IC3228. IC3128 is a single core / 4 thread SoC, and IC3228 is a dual MVP core / 8 threads SoC. Let’s have a look at IC3228 technical specifications: CPU function 4-way simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) in each core Symmetric-multi-processing (SMP), dual MVP cores 64KB I-cache, 64KB D-cache and 64KB local memory in each core, 256KB shared L2 cache Homogeneous parallel programs Support Pthread, OpenMP GPU function Data parallel, Task parallel, and/or Function parallel computing Multi-standard media processor Programmable unified shader Support OpenGL ES 2.0 70 million triangles / sec, […]

July 22, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Imagination Technologies Unveils Low Power Low Footprint PowerVR GX5300 GPU for Wearables

Up to now most wearables are based on MCU solutions or derived from mobile platforms, which may either not provide the advanced features required by users, or consume too much power and take more space than needed. With Ineda Dhanush and Mediatek Aster, we’ve already seen silicon vendors design wearables SoCs, and now Imagination Technologies has just announced PowerVR GX5300 GPU targeting wearables with support for OpenGL ES 2.0, 480p to 720p resolution, and using 0.55mm2 silicon area based on 28nm process. PowerVR GX5300 GPU will be support Android, Android Wear, and Linux based operation systems, and according to the company has the following key features: Unified shaders – The TBDR graphics architecture offers unified shaders where vertex, pixel and GPU compute resources are scaled simultaneously. Low power and high precision graphics – All PowerVR GPUs offer a mix of low (FP16) and high precision (FP32) rendering and implement the […]

July 9, 2014July 9, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

AllWinner V10 and V15 SoCs Target Video Recording Applications

AllWinner A-series that can be found in tablets and media players are pretty well known, but AllWinner also has V-Series processors with V10 and V15. A first glance, AllWinner V10 is quite similar to AllWinner A31 with a quad core Cortex A7 CPU coupled with a PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU, and AllWinner V15 has the same CPU/GPU combo as AllWinner A10 (CortexA8/Mali-400). But AllWinner V-Series are actually video encoders targeting applications such as IP cameras, car DVRs, and sports digital video cameras thanks to features such as motion detection, video scaling, and digital watermarking. Let’s go through AllWinner V10 specifications, and I’ll mark differences with AllWinner A31, or features not mentioned in A31 specs, in bold: CPU – Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 with· 256KB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache GPU – PowerVR SGX544MP2 compliant with OpenCL 1.1 EP and delivering up to 20GFLOPS. Memory – 32-bit DDR3/LPDDR2 SDRAM controller, supporting up to […]

June 5, 2014June 14, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Ineda Systems Dhanush WPU is a MIPS based SoC Specifically Designed for Wearables

What’s a WPU? It stands for Wearable Processor Unit, and as you may guess it’s a processor specifically designed to be used in wearables such as smartwatches or fitness trackers. Currently, many wearables are based on application processors that are used in smartphones (e.g. Galaxy Gear), and lower-end versions are based on standard low power MCUs (e.g. Pebble), but none of them are actually based on SoC specifically designed for wearables, and analysts are asserting that new types of SoC are definitely needed if companies are to provide wearables with the battery life and features consumers want. Ineda Systems Dhanush WPU is not the first Wearable SoC announced, as for instance AllWinner mentioned their WX quad-core SoC for Wearables should become available in Q4 2014 in their roadmap, and Mediatek vaguely unveiled their Aster SoC at CES 2014, but it’s the first that I know of where we’ve got most of the […]

June 4, 2014June 7, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Cavium ThunderX Server SoC Features up to 48 ARM 64-bit Cores

ARM SBSA specification for server supports up to 268,435,456 CPU cores for the second level of standardization on one or a combination of SoCs. We’re not quite up there just yet, but Cavium ThunderX is an ARM server SoC with up to 48 cores on a single chip, which is the highest number of cores I’ve ever heard of in an ARM SoC. The company created their own custom processor cores using an ARMv8 architecture license, designing an SoC complies with ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard with the following key features: ARM based SoC that scales up from 8 to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency with 78K I-Cache, 32K D-Cache, and 16MB L2 cache. Fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI) Integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth 4x DDR3/4 72-bit memory controllers supporting up to 1TB RAM […]

January 16, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Your New ARM SoC Linux Support Check-List – ELCE 2012

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Free Electrons, describes the steps he followed to add a new Marvell SoC to the mainline kernel at ELCE 2012. Abstract: Since Linus Torvalds raised warnings about the state of the ARM architecture support in the Linux kernel, a huge amount of effort and reorganization has happened in the way Linux supports ARM SoCs. From the addition of the device tree to the pinctrl subsystem, from the new clock framework to the new rules in code organization and design, the changes have been significant over the last one and half year in the Arm Linux kernel world. Based on the speaker’s experience on getting the support for the new Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoC support in the mainline Linux kernel, we will give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support. We aim at […]

January 15, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Ambarella Unveils A9 4K Ultra HD Camera SoC

Ambarella has recently today introduced the A9 camera System on Chip (SoC) with support for the new 4K Ultra HD video standard in order to power next generation of mirrorless, sports, and digital still cameras. Ambarella A9 SoC features two ARM Cortex A9 cores (surprisingly), as well as Ambarella Image and Video DSPs. The A9’s video features include video timelapse modes, capture of high-resolution still images during video recording, Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS), and burst capture of up to sixty 12-megapixel still images per second. Ultra-wide angle and small form factor lenses are supported with full lens distortion correction. The A9 also support High Dynamic Range (HDR) video. Ambarella A9 Feature Summary: 4K Ultra HD video recording @ 30 fps. High definition video recording at 720p @ 240fps and 1080p @ 120fps. Burst mode support for still image capture of over 700 Megapixels per second. Multi-exposure High Dynamic Range (HDR) […]