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Wave Computing to Open Source MIPS Architecture

There has been a lot of talks about RISC-V open source, royalty-free instructions set architecture this year,  including the launch of RISC-V MCUs and Linux capable RISC-V processors,  and corresponding development boards such as Hifive Unleashed. This even lead Arm to create a – now shutdown – microsite telling why people should stick with Arm instead of RISC-V. While RISC-V was clearly on the rise this year, MIPS architecture once a dominant players in routers and set-top box has been on the decline, even prompting Blu to write a guest review entitled “Baikal T1 MIPS Processor – The Last of the Mohicans?” hinting at the near extincsion of MIPS based solutions. But there may be hope, or at least a last ditch effort, with Wave Computing purchasing MIPS from Imagination Technology earlier this year, and now announcing the MIPS Open Initiative to effectively open source 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS ISA […]

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$6 C-SKY Linux Development Board Features GX6605S Media SoC with C-SKY ISA

We’ve got plenty of ultra low cost , media capable Linux boards in recent years, but most of those are based on Arm architecture. More recently RISC-V open source ISA has started to show up in various boards such as Sipeed M1, but none of those can play video, or at least don’t come with an hardware video decoder. C-Sky Linux development board does change that somewhat. It’s sold for about $6 (39 RMB) on Taobao, and $17.36 shipped on Aliexpress, and features Nationalchip GX6605S processor for DVB-S2 HD set-top boxes using C-SKY architecture, independent from RISC-V, although C-SKY is also a member of the RISV-C foundation. C-SKY Linux development board key features and specifications: SoC – Nationalchip GX6605S C-SKY ISA V1 CK610M 32-bit processor @ 574 MHz with 64MB DDR2 RAM, built-in DVB-S2/S demodulator Storage – 4MB SPI flash for bootloader and media player program Video Output – HDMI […]

ArmSoM CM5 - Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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96Boards AI Sophon Edge Developer Board Features Bitmain BM1880 ASIC SoC

Bitmain, a company specializing in cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI) application, has just joined Linaro, and announced the first 96Boards AI platform featuring an ASIC: Sophon BM1880 Edge Development Board, often just referred to as “Sophon Edge”. The board conforms to the 96Boards CE specification, and include two Arm Cortex-A53 cores, a Bitmain Sophon Edge TPU delivering 1 TOPS performance on 8-bit integer operations, USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet. Sophon Edge specifications: SoC ASIC – Sophon BM1880 dual core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.5 GHz, single core RISC-V processor @ 1 GHz, 2MB on-chip RAM, and a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) that can provide 1TOPS for INT8,and up to 2 TOPs by enabling Winograd convolution acceleration System Memory – 1GB LPDDR4 @ 3200Mhz Storage – 8GB eMMC flash + micro SD card slot Video Processing – H.264 decoder, MJPEG encoder/decoder, 1x 1080p @ 60fps or 2x 1080p @ 30fps H.264 decoder, […]

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Bonsai Algorithm Enables Machine Learning on Arduino with a 2KB RAM Footprint

Machine learning used to be executed in the cloud, then the inference part  moved to the edge, and we’ve even seen micro-controllers able to do image recognition with GAP8 RISC-V micro-controller. But I’ve recently come across a white paper entitled “Resource-efficient Machine Learning in 2 KB RAM for the Internet of Things” that shows how it’s possible to perform such tasks with very little resources. Here’s the abstract: This paper develops a novel tree-based algorithm, called Bonsai, for efficient prediction on IoT devices – such as those based on the Arduino Uno board having an 8 bit ATmega328P microcontroller operating at 16 MHz with no native floating point support, 2 KB RAM and 32 KB read-only flash. Bonsai maintains prediction accuracy while minimizing model size and prediction costs by: (a) developing a tree model which learns a single, shallow, sparse tree with powerful nodes; (b) sparsely projecting all data into […]

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Embedded Linux Conference Europe & OpenIoT Summit Europe 2018 Schedule

The Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2018 took place in March of this year in the US, but the European version of the events are now planned to take place on October 21-24 in Edinburg, UK, and the schedule has already been released. So let’s make a virtual schedule to find out more about some of interesting subjects that are covered at the conferences. The conference and summit really only officially start on Monday 22, but there are a few talks on Sunday afternoon too. Sunday, October 21 13:30 – 15:15 – Tutorial: Introduction to Quantum Computing Using Qiskit – Ali Javadi-Abhari, IBM Qiskit is a comprehensive open-source tool for quantum computation. From simple demonstrations of quantum mechanical effects to complicated algorithms for solving problems in AI and chemistry, Qiskit allows users to build and run programs on quantum computers of today. Qiskit is built with modularity and extensibility […]

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My Attempt at Getting Started with Zephyr Project OS on ESP32

Zephyr Project is a real-time operating systems for the Internet of Things (IoT) that was introduced in early 2016, and supported/hosted by the Linux Foundation. It runs on a fairly large number of MCU boards from different architecture (x86, Arm, RISC-V, etc..), and Linaro even launched 96boards IoT compliant hardware like BLE Carbon board that are designed to run Zephyr Project. More recently, Linaro CEO revealed several commercial products are shipping with Zephyr Project OS, so I thought it might be a good time to give it a try. Target Board – Wemos Lolin32 I only had STM32 Bluepill, and some ESP32 boards, so I went with the latter since it comes with WiFi. But instead of re-using some of my existing boards, I asked Banggood whether they could send Wemos Lolin32, which they did. They sell it for $7.99 shipped, but any other ESP32 board should do. The board […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Linux 4.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.16: So the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7, in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn’t for that, it would all be very small and calm. We had a number of fixes and cleanups elsewhere, but none of it made me go “uhhuh, better let this soak for another week”. And davem didn’t think the networking was a reason to delay the release, so I’m not. End result: 4.16 is out, and the merge window for 4.17 is open and I’ll start doing pull requests tomorrow. Outside of networking, most of the last week was various arch fixlets (powerpc, arm, x86, arm64), some driver fixes (mainly scsi and rdma) and misc other noise (documentation, vm, perf). The appended shortlog gives an overview of the details (again, this is only the small stuff in […]

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Status of Embedded GPU Ecosystem – Linux/Mesa Upstream Support (ELC 2018 Video)

The Embedded Linux Confernce is on-going, and the Linux Foundation has been uploading videos about talks in a timely manner on YouTube. I checked out at RISC-V keynote yesterday, but today I’ve watched a talk by Robert Foss (his real name, not related to FOSS) from Collabora entitled “Progress in the Embedded GPU Ecosystem”, where he discusses open source software support in Linux/Mesa from companies and reverse-engineering support. The first part deals with the history of embedded GPU support, especially when it comes to company support. Intel was the first and offers very good support for their drivers, following by AMD who also is a good citizen. NVIDIA has the Nouveau driver but they did not really backed it up, and Tegra support is apparently sponsored by an aircraft supplier. Other companies have been slower to help, but Qualcomm has made progress since 2015 and now support all their hardware, […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products