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Popcorn Hour VTEN 4K Linux Media Player Unboxing & Teardown

Cloud Media (aka Syabas) sent me their latest Popcorn Hour VTEN media player. It supports HDMI output up to 4K, H.265 video codec, and features an eSATA connector, as well as optical and coaxial S/PDIF connectors. Today, I’ll show some pictures of the kit, and teardown the box to checkout the hardware, and in a few days, I’ll report on the user interface, video playback, and HDMI audio pass-through capabilities. Popcorm Hour VTEN Unboxing The unexpected device was sent via Fedex in the package shown below. It lists some of the key features such as H.265, DSD (Direct Stream Digital), FLAC, Matroska, UPnP, 3D, and 4K Ultra HD support, as well as the specs, and more features and package content in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. The box comes with an IR remote control and two AAA batteries, an HDMI cable, a SATA cable, a 5V/3A […]

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Linux 4.0 Release – Main Changes, ARM and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds “Ima Sheep” released Linux Kernel 4.0 on Sunday: So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule, because there really weren’t any known issues, and while I’ll be traveling during the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I’m hoping that won’t affect the merge window very much. We’ll see. Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final size, although obviously “small” is all relative. It’s still over 10k non-merge commits. But we’ve definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones). Which is all good. It definitely matches the “v4.0 is supposed to be a_stable_ release”, and very much not about new experimental features etc. I’m personally so much happier with time-based releases than the bad old days when we had feature-based releases. That said, there’s a few […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
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Allwinner H-Series OTT SoC Roadmap Adds H5 and H2+ Processors

Previously Allwinner only had A-Series processor such as A10 that were used in tablets and media players, but they’ve recently launch H-series processors for “Home entertainment” such as H64, H8 or H3 SoCs that have been specifically designed for media players and OTT (Over-the-top) boxes. The company has unveiled its OTT SoC roadmap at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair which adds two new processors Allwinner H2 and Allwinner H5. Allwinner H2+ will a quad core Cortex A7 processor support H.265 video decoding, 1080p decoding, and TrustZone support, and should the cheapest processor of the family. Based on the chart above, the processor must have been sampling by the end of last year, so H2+ media players should come to market very soon. Allwinner H5 will be at the other end of the scale, featuring eight Cortex A53 cores, a 4K H.265 decoder, an H.265 encoder (1080p?), and TrustZone support as […]

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How to Compare Systems Benchmarked with Phoronix Test Suite

Phoronix Test Suite is an open source benchmark for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows & BSD operating systems, but in practice it’s mostly used for Linux OS since other benchmarks solutions are available in Windows, while choices are more limited in Linux. There are many benchmarks to choose from, and you can select the ones you want by running a “batch-benchmarks” from the command line. I’ve done so when testing performance of ODROID-XU3 Lite and Cubieboard4 boards in Ubuntu, and once the tests are completed, the results will be automatically uploaded to openbenchmarking.org. From there, it’s quite easy to compare recent results as you’ll get an “add to comparison” option on the site, and you can pick a few results. You can select a few systems, and then click on “Compare Results” to get a side-by-side comparison. If you want to compare your system to an existing system, you […]

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ALi M3733 Dual Core Processor Finds its Way into DVB-T2 & DVB-S2 Android and Linux Set-top Boxes

Ten years ago, I remember ALi was in big player in DVD players, but I had not much heard about them since then. Thanks to a ARMdevices.net I found out they are still around, and their latest Ali M3733 dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor will soon be found in DVB set-top boxes like Uyesee L100T2 with a DVB-T2 tuner, or EKT DSD7045 DVB-S2 hybrid set-top box. The former is running Android 4.4, but the latter is likely based on Linux since it only has 512MB NAND flash. The EKT receiver runs SolidTV middleware with HbbTV, conditional access, and more features, and it does look like an interesting product, but I’ll focus on the Uyesse for this post: SoC – ALi M3733 dual core Cortex A9 processor with a dual core Mali-400 GPU System Memory – 512 MB DDR3 (Option: 1GB) Storage – 4GB NAND flash (Options: 8 to 32GB) […]

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Relative Performance of ARM Cortex-A 32-bit and 64-bit Cores

Many people assume newer processors will be faster, or that 64-bit processor will provide a performance boost compared to 32-bit processors, but the reality can be quite different, and I’ve decided to have a look at ARM Cortex-A cores using ARMv7 (32-bit) and ARMv8 (64-bit) architecture, and see what kind of integer performance you can expect from each at a given frequency. To do so, I’ve simply use DMIPS/Mhz (Dhrystone MIPS/Megahertz) values listed on Wikipedia. Drystone benchmark has no floating-point operating, so it’s a pure integer benchmark. I’m only looking at ARM core here, and once integrated in an SoC, other parameters like memory bandwidth, amount of cache,  GPU, etc.. will greatly affect the overall system performance. The figure above are per MHz, and it does not mean for example that a Cortex A5 processor will be slower than a Cortex A7 processor, as can be seen by the comparison […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Vortex86DX3 is a New x86 SoC for Embedded Systems

Intel is already making embedded version of their processor with example with Bay Trail-I or Quark SoCs, but Taiwan based DMP Electronics has also been making x86 SoC such as Vortex86EX that can be found in $39 86duino Zero board, which must be one the cheapest, if not the cheapest, x86 board on the market. Of course, this is not designed to run Windows and Office, but rather some embedded (IoT) applications. The company has recently launched Vortex86DX3, a more powerful x86 dual core processor, suited to embedded systems and communication products such as thin clients, NAT routers, gateways, etc… DMP Vortex86DX3 specifications: Dual Core x86 Processor @ 1GHz with 6 stage pipeline, x86 instruction set Floating point – Implements ANSI/IEEE standard 754-1985 for binary Floating-Point Architecture Cache – 8-way 32K I-Cache, 8-way 32K D-Cache,  4-way 512KB L2 Cache with write through or write back policy System DDR3 Control Interface – 32-bit data […]

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Rockchip RK3368 64-bit ARM Android Boxes Are Coming Soon

Yesterday, Rockchip had an event for their Atom x3-C3230RK SoCs (previously known as Sofia)  developed in collaboration with Intel, and upcoming Android 5.1 tablets and smartphones based on the new platform, as well as progress with their first 64-bit ARM SoC (RK3368) that is now integrated into Android TV boxes, albeit still in development. Padnews wrote a summary of the event, but in this post I’ll focus on Rockchip RK3368 hardware. One of the first product will be X6 TV box. Padnews did not have a readable picture with the specs, but Eric of Geekbuying also went to the event, and kindly provided a clear picture with the specs (Mali-600MP is however not the GPU used in RK3368): SoC – Rockchip RK3368 octa core Cortex A53 processor with PowerVR G6110 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.x/2.0/3.x, OpenGL 3.2, DirectX 9.3, OpenCL 1.2 EP, and Renderscript System Memory – 1 […]

Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications