Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments on VIA Unveils VAB-820 Pico-ITX Board Powered by Freescale i.MX6 Quad

VIA Unveils VAB-820 Pico-ITX Board Powered by Freescale i.MX6 Quad

About two weeks ago, VIA announced the VAB-820, which according to the company, is the first ARM based quad core Pico-ITX single board computer (SBC) on the market. A claim that looks to be incorrect by the way. The board is powered by Freescale i.MX6Quad quad core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and comes with 1GB DDR3 SDRAM and 4GB eMMC Flash. This is an industrial board targeting in-vehicle, surveillance and industrial applications, designed to work in an operating temperature range from -20°C ~ 70°, and with a seven years longevity support. VAB-820 Specifications: SoC – Freescale i.MX 6Quad ARM Cortex-A9 @ 1.0GHz with Vivante GC2000 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3-1066 SDRAM using 128M x16 memory devices Storage – 4MB SPI Serial Flash, 4GB eMMC Flash, and microSD slot (up to 64GB) Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet using Micrel KSZ9031RNX Ethernet transceiver with RGMII support Audio – Freescale SGTL5000 low power stereo […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Imagination Technologies Announced MIPS P5600, the First “Warrior” Core

Imagination Technologies Announced MIPS P5600, the First “Warrior” Core

At the end of June, Imagination Technologies unveiled their MIPS Series5 ‘Warrior’ architecture, featuring 32-bit and 64-bit CPU cores, with features such as hardware and software virtualization, and Extended Virtual Addressing (EVA). The company has recently announced the first member of the family with their MIPS P5600 CPU IP core. The MIPS P5600 core is a 32-bit CPU IP that is said to offer 1.2 to 2x more system performance compared to proAptiv cores, and it supports peak frequencies above 2GHz on TSMC’s 28HPM process node. Performance-wise the core achieves 5 CoreMark/MHz and 3.5 DMIPS/MHz for a single core, which appears to be equivalent to ARM Cortex A15 according to values listed in Wikipedia and EEMBC Coremark results. MIPS P5600 features and benefits: 32-bit MIPS32 Release 5 Instruction Set Architecture 16-stage, wide issue, out-of-order (OoO) pipeline Quad instruction fetch per cycle Triple bonded dispatch per cycle Instruction peak issue of […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments on Geniatech ATV1800 Android TV Box To Feature AMLogic Quad Core Processor & Android 4.3

Geniatech ATV1800 Android TV Box To Feature AMLogic Quad Core Processor & Android 4.3

A few months ago, we learned AMLogic was working on a Quad core Cortex A9 SoC with the new ARM Mali-450MP6 (8 cores) GPU called AML8726-M8. It turns out AML8726-M8 may not only be one processor, but a family of processors (M801, M802, M803, and M805) according to a recent article in Chinese. This SoC was going to be part of Geniatech ATV1800 Android STB, but specifications were not available. More details have now surfaced. Geniatech (aka Mygica) ATV1800 Enjoy TV Specifications: SoC – AMLogic M801 or M802 Quad core Cortex A9 @ 1.6 to 2.0 GHz + ARM Mali-450MP6 GPU System Memory –  2GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB NAND + microSD card slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p, and composite Audio Output – HDMI, Stereo RCA output, and optical SPDIF (TBC) Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet, built-in 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, and Bluetooth USB – 4 USB 2.0 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on Android 4.4 KitKat on Galaxy Nexus – ROM, Linaro, and Petition

Android 4.4 KitKat on Galaxy Nexus – ROM, Linaro, and Petition

Google has already released the binaries for Android 4.4 “KitKat” for the Nexus 5, and images are coming for Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10, in the next few weeks. Source code is also available in AOSP (Android Open Source Project). However, even though KitKat has been optimized for older devices, the Galaxy Nexus won’t an official Android 4.4 released because it was released at the end of 2011, which is over the 18 months update window guaranteed by Google. Many people are upset about this decision, and several people have started working on KitKat for Galaxy Nexus. The Linaro team found a solution within minutes by going to the convenience store, and providing KitKat on Galaxy Nexus as shown below. However, usability was not really ideal, so they had some more work to do… In the meantime, Grabak, a developer and member of XDA Forums, provided an alpha […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments on $69 Intel Gallileo Development Board Combines x86 Processor and Arduino Compatibility

$69 Intel Gallileo Development Board Combines x86 Processor and Arduino Compatibility

After UDOO, a Linux development board powered by Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex 9 processor and an Atmel SAM3U MCU for Arduino compatibility, here’s another single board computer (SBC) that both runs Linux, and is claimed to be software and hardware compatible with shields designed for Arduino Uno R3: Intel Gallileo. Instead of using two ARM processors, the board is powered by Intel Quark SoC X1000, a 32-bit Pentium class SoC, that handles both Linux and I/Os. Intel Galileo Specifications: SoC – Intel Quark SoC X1000 @ 400MHz with 16 KBytes on-die L1 cache, 512 KBytes of on-die embedded SRAM, single thread, single core, constant speed, ACPI compatible CPU sleep states supported, and integrated Real Time Clock (RTC). Max TDP: 2.2W. System Memory – 256 MByte DRAM Storage – 8 MByte Legacy SPI Flash for bootloader and sketch + 11 KByte EEPROM + optional microSD card (Up to 32GB) Connectors: 10/100 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on ARM Based Servers and Servers-on-a-Chip (SoCs) at ARM Techcon 2013

ARM Based Servers and Servers-on-a-Chip (SoCs) at ARM Techcon 2013

ARM Techcon 2013 took place on October 29 – 31, 2013, in Santa Clara, and several companies announced servers, or chips for server based on ARM technology. None of those are for home used, but for now ARM based servers target enterprise and cloud data. Yet end users may them indirectly when they access social networks such as Facebook, or other online services such as Paypal. Calxeda ECX-2000 SoC After their ECX-1000 quad core Cortex A9 Server-on-chip, Calxeda has announced ECX-2000 SoC featuring four Cortex A15 cores. The new SoC provides about twice the performance, 3 times the memory bandwidth, and 4 times the memory capacity (up to 16GB RAM) of the earlier chip.   One of the key advantage of Cortex A15 over Cortex A9 is hardware virtualization that allows support for KVM and Xen hypervisors. ECX-2000 is supported in Canonical Ubuntu Linux 13.10 and can run Havana Openstack. Other […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Motorola’s Project Ara Open Source Hardware Plaform for Modular Smartphones

Motorola’s Project Ara Open Source Hardware Plaform for Modular Smartphones

A few months ago, I posted a video about “The Smarter Phone“, a concept smartphone that was supposed to be serviceable and upgradeable just like PCs used to be, in order to reduce e-waste among other things. Based on comments here and on Reddit, most people did not really believe the concept was feasible, practical or cost effective, myself included. Fast forward to September, a video about another concept modular smartphone called Phonebloks went viral with over 17 million views. The overall idea is basically the same, but this time there seems to be at least a mockup. Phonebloks features a base where you can attach blocks such as the display, a wifi module, processor module, bluetooth module and so on. It turns out Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group has been working on something similar for a year with Project Ara, and they recently partnered with Phonebloks’ guys, since […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linux Kernel 3.12 Released

Linux Kernel 3.12 Released

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.12: I was vacillating whether to do an rc8 or just cut the final 3.12, but since the biggest reason to *not* do a final release was not so much the state of the code, as simply the fact that I’ll be traveling with very bad internet connection next week, I didn’t really want to delay the release. Sure, we had a number of driver reverts, and there was an annoying auto-NUMA memory corruption fix series, but none of it was really worth delaying 3.12 for. But the fact that I’m going to be (effectively) off-line next week means that I’m *not* opening the merge window for 3.13 yet – since I won’t have the bandwidth to really do merges anyway. That doesn’t mean that you can’t send me pull request for the merge window early, of course – maintainers can […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC