arm News - Page 24 of 83 - CNX Software

April 25, 2020April 25, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 47 Comments

Ampere eMAG 64bit Arm Workstation Enables Native Arm Development

Over the last few years, several companies have come up with 64-bit Arm workstation to allow developers to test Arm code natively which may be important to avoid network delays or test applications requiring video or graphics. Those started to become available in 2018 from the relatively low-end 24-core Cortex-A53 Linaro “Synquacer” Developerbox to the much more powerful (and expensive) GIGABYTE ThunderXStation Workstation powered by up to two 32-core ThunderX2 processors. In the fall of 2019, SolidRun started to ship HoneyComb LX2K 16-core Arm Workstation motherboard with and NXP LX2160A 16-core Cortex-A72 processor that offers significantly more performance than the Linaro Box at a reasonable price ($750). While reading a recent Anandtech post with photos of an engineering sample, I found out Avantek was also offering the Ampere eMAG 64bit Arm Workstation powered by an Ampere eMAG 8180 32-core server processor. Ampere eMAG 64-bit Arm workstation specifications: SoC – Ampere […]

April 14, 2020April 14, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 61 Comments

BreadBee is a Tiny Embedded Linux SBC based on MStar MSC313E Camera SoC (Crowdfunding)

There are plenty of tiny and compact Arm Linux SBC on the market from NanoPi NEO to Raspberry Pi Zero or Rock Pi S. But Daniel Palmer has been able to design an even smaller board – BreadBee – based on MStar MSC313E Cortex-A7 SoC since the processor also embeds 64MB RAM, or enough to run embedded Linux.BreadBee specifications: SoC – MStar MSC313E Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ ~1.0 GHz with NEON, FPU, 64MB DDR2 Storage – 16MB SPI NOR flash Networking – 10/100M Ethernet (RJ45) USB – 1x Micro USB 2.0 port Expansion 24-pin dual-row header (2.54mm pitch) with SPI, I2C, 4x 10-bit ADC, 3x UART, GPIOs 21-pin header (1.27mm pitch) with SD/SDIO, USB 2.0, GPIOs Misc – RTC, Watchdog timer Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port Dimensions – 32 x 30mm Despite MStar MSC313E being a camera processor, the camera interface does not seem exposed in the […]

April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Rosetta@Home Now Supports 64-bit Arm SBC’s and Servers in the Fight against COVID-19

Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home projects aim to perform biomedical research using the computing power of volunteers. Basically, you just need to install a program on your computer, and it will use idle computing power to perform complex calculations without slowing down your computer as long as you are not short in RAM. The projects are now working on COVID-19 to understand how SARS-CoV-2 protein is structured which could help find a cure. The programs have been available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 targets for years, but very recently Rosetta@Home has been made available for 64-bit ARM targets so people can also run BOINC program on Arm Linux SBCs such as Raspberry Pi 4, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, or Rock64, or even powerful Arm servers to help with Rosetta@Home project’s COVID-19 research. As explained in an article on miniNodes, you’ll need a board with at least 2GB […]

March 31, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 42 Comments

This is what HoneyComb LX2K 16-core Arm Workstation Looks Like (Video)

Back in February 2019, while referring to Arm server, Linus Torvalds famously said: I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won’t be all that stable. Or successful. … If you develop on x86, then you’re going to want to deploy on x86, because you’ll be able to run what you test “at home” (and by “at home” I don’t mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). … Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which means that they’ll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff). SolidRun had already worked on products with NXP LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex A72 processor and found out it could be a match to make a powerful […]

March 30, 2020April 15, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 5.6 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.6 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: So I’ll admit to vacillating between doing this 5.6 release and doing another -rc. This has a bit more changes than I’d like, but they are mostly from davem’s networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It’s just slightly more than I’d have preferred at this stage – not doesn’t really seem worth delaying a release over. So about half the diff from the final week is network driver fixlets, and some minor core networking fixes. Another 20% is tooling – mostly bpf and netfilter selftests (but also some perf work). The rest is “misc” – mostly random drivers (gpio, rdma, input) and DTS files. With a smattering of fixes elsewhere (a couple of afs fixes, some vm fixes, etc). […]

March 2, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

V-Raptor Edge RK3399 Mini PC Runs Xubuntu 18.04 with EBBR Support

We previously wrote about XS LAB’s V-Raptor server equipped with SocioNext SC2A11 24-core Arm Cortex-A53 SoC, but the Korean company has been working on a different kind of project with V-Raptor Edge mini PC powered by Rockchip RK3399 processor and running Xubuntu 18.04 with an Arm EBBR-compliant UEFI bootloader. The mini PC was designed to work as a thin client for Cloud PC VDI service from SK Broadband, but XS Lab appears open to expand its use to other applications depending on interest from distributors. V-Raptor Edge PC preliminary specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 cores @ up to 1.8 GHz, 4x Arm Cortex-A53 cores System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash or 32GB MicroSD card Video Output – HDMI 2.0 up to 4K, and DisplayPort via USB-C port; dual-independent display support up to 2x Full HD Audio – 3.5mm headphone jack, […]

February 28, 2020March 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Panfrost Open-Source Arm Mali GPU Driver Gets Experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 Support

Panfrost is the open-source driver being developed for Arm Midgard and Bitfrost GPUs. The first versions focused on support for OpenGL ES 2.0, but the more recent OpenGL ES 3.0 enables faster and more realistic rendering. The goods news is that Panfrost support for experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 has landed in Mesa according to a recent post on Collabora blog. Specifically, Panfrost now supports instanced rendering, primitive restart, uniform buffer objects, 3D textures, and multiple render targets (on Mali T760 and up) all of which are OpenGL ES 3.0 features. People who are not into graphics development may not know about the purpose of those features, but Alyssa Rosenzweig, a free software graphics hacker leading Panfrost, explains: … instanced rendering and primitive restart allow developers to write faster graphics applications, to render efficiently scenes more complex than possible in ES 2.0. … uniform buffer objects and 3D texture give developers […]