arm News - Page 32 of 83 - CNX Software

January 8, 2019January 8, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

V-Raptor is a 24-Core Arm Server based on SocioNext SC2A11 SoC

Socionext SC2A11 24-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor has gotten into more hardware recently. We recently showcased a demo of an upcoming Banana Pi 24-core Arm server, but they’ll be joined by South Korea based XSLAB which prepare to launch their own V-Raptor 24-core microserver in February 2019. The server is based on SC2A11 processor coupled with their own BMC (Baseboard Management Controller). A 24-core micro server node is shown below with SC2A11 processor covered by a black heatsink, as well as a RAM stick. As I understand it, one or several V-Raptor microserver can then be inserted into a PCIe slot of the mainboard which supports up to 32 nodes on 2U rack size, so that would be a total of 24 x 32 = 768 Arm Cortex A53 cores. The detailed specifications of the server are not shown yet on the almost empty company website. The company may also have made […]

January 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 31 Comments

Huawei Kunpeng 920 is a 7nm 64-core Armv8 Server Processor

We’ve seen several Armv8 processors for the datacenter launched in recent years from companies like Cavium – now part of Marvell – and Ampere. Another company now joins the fray with Huawei having just introduced their Kunpeng 920 64-core Armv8 processor manufactured with a 7nm process, and offering 8-channel DDR4 RAM, and fast interfaces such as 10GbE and PCIe 4.0. Kunpeng 920 features and specifications: CPU – 64x Armv8 cores clocked at up to 2.6 Ghz delivering a 930 SPECint score Memory I/F – 8x DDR4 @ 2933 MHz for 6 to 8 channels memory Storage – 16x SAS/SATA interfaces High Speed Interfaces – 40x PCIe 4.0 including 16 that can be used for CCIX (Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators); 640 Gbps total bandwidth Networking – 2x 100G RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) Process – 7nm process The company customized their ARMv8 cores in order to improve performance by optimizing […]

December 27, 2018December 28, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

SDTxArm Pelion Kit is a Modular IoT Devkit Designed for Arm Mbed Cloud Platform

South Korea based Sigma Delta Technologies’ SDTxArm Pelion Kit is a modular development kit comprised of a baseboard, as well as CPU and interface modules that is specifically designed to work with Arm Pelion cloud based device management service and Mbed OS for wearables and IoT applications. DAP (Debug Access Port) Station Ver.2 baseboard key features and specifications: USB – 1x micro USB 2.0 port Expansion I/Os via rows of through-holes 3x UART Interfaces 4x SPI Interfaces 3x I²C Interfaces 7x GPIO 4x analog inputs Debugging / Programming 1x TC2050 tag connection designed to allow programming without purchasing additional Interface if the user already has an appropriate Interface Module from other companies. I assume this is related to Tag Connect TC2050-IDC. 1x SD-TAG with JTAG/SWD signals Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port The DAP station takes an SDT Board (i.e. CPU board), as well as an interface board […]

December 26, 2018December 28, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Linux 4.20 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

After Greg K-H handling Linux 4.19 release, Linus Torvalds is back at the helm, and released Linux 4.20 just before Christmas: Let’s face it, last week wasn’t quite as quiet as I would have hoped for, but there really doesn’t seem to be any point to delay 4.20 because everybody is already taking a break. And it’s not like there are any known issues, it’s just that the shortlog below is a bit longer than I would have wished for. Nothing screams “oh, that’s scary”, though. And as part of the “everybody is already taking a break”, I can happily report that I already have quite a few early pull requests in my inbox. I encouraged people to get it over and done with, so that people can just relax over the year-end holidays. In fact, I probably won’t start pulling for a couple of days, but otherwise let’s just […]

December 26, 2018December 27, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 26 Comments

Banana Pi to Launch a 24-Core Arm Server

SinoVoIP has been offering Banana Pi single board computers for several years. Their boards are generally based on Arm processors, offered at a relatively decent price, although not as quite as good value as FriendlyELEC and Orange Pi ones. The company is also known for providing subpar documentation and firmware images, but a fairly active community still formed around their boards 🙂 The company has now demonstrated something a little different with a 24-core Arm server that should eventually be sold as a Banana Pi server board or actual server, as the full details are yet to be known. We did not get a glimpse at the actual hardware, but the blurry photo above gives some clues. We have 24-core Arm Cortex A53 processor with 32GB RAM (29.4GB seen by the OS) running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with MATE desktop. There aren’t that many 24-core Arm Cortex A53 processors, so unless […]

December 19, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Arm Cortex-A65AE Targets Safety-Critical Automotive, Aviation, and Industrial Automation Applications

Arm introduced their first “Automotive Enhanced” processor with Cortex-A76AE last September. The processor targets autonomous driving applications, and comes with extra safety features such Dual Core Lock-Step (DCLS) running the same code on two different cores to continuously check the execution result is the same on both. The company has now unveiled a second AE core with Cortex-A65AE, which Arm claims is the first multithreaded Automotive Enhanced Cortex-A CPU technology to deliver the highest safety levels with Dual Core Lock-Step (DCLS). Arm Cortex-A65AE specifications: Architecture – Armv8-A (Harvard) Extensions – Armv8.1, Armv8.2, Cryptography, RAS, and Armv8.3 (LDAPR instructions only) ISA support – A64 Microarchitecture Out-of-order Pipeline Superscalar NEON/Floating Point Unit Optional Cryptography Unit Max number of CPUs in cluster – Eight Physical Addressing (PA) – 44-bit Dual Core Lock-Step Memory system and external interfaces L1 I-Cache / D-Cache – 16KB to 64KB L2 Cache – 64KB to 256KB L3 Cache […]

December 7, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx 7nm Processor is Designed for Always-Connected PCs

The first day of Qualcomm Tech Summit focused on 5G technology, the second day revealed details about Snapdragon 855 mobile processor, and the third and last day was about Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform, a 7nm processor specifically designed for always-on always-connected PCs that performs as well as some 15W processor(s) from Intel, but at much lower power consumption. Snapdragon 8cx specifications: CPU – 8x Qualcomm Kryo 495 64-bit cores (dual cluster) with a total of 10MB cache; 7nm Process Technology Visual Subsystem – Qualcomm Adreno 680 GPU with DX12 support, 128-bit memory interface Memory – LPDDR4x, 8 Channels Storage – NVME SSD, UFS3.0 Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Engine Qualcomm Hexagon 685 DSP Qualcomm All-Ways Aware technology AI features 4th Generation Qualcomm AI Engine Enhanced voice assistant experiences for Alexa and Cortana with Qualcomm Aqstic technology Display Maximum On-Device Display Support: 4K Dual 4K external displays support Audio Qualcomm Aqstic audio technology […]

November 29, 2018November 29, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 74 Comments

Amazon EC2 A1 Arm Instances Deliver up to 45% Cost Savings over x86 Instances

Just a couple of days ago, Amazon introduced EC2 A1 Arm instances based on custom-designed AWS Graviton processors featuring up to 32 Arm Neoverse cores. Commenters started a discussion about price and the real usefulness of Arm cores compared to x86 cores since the latter are likely to be better optimized, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing for EC2 A1 instances did not seem that attractive to some. The question whether it makes sense will obviously depend on the workload, and metrics like performance per dollar, and performance per watt. AWS re:Invent 2018 is taking place now, and we are starting to get some answers with Amazon claiming up to 45% reduction in costs. It sounds good, except there’s not much information about the type of workload here. So it would be good if there was an example of company leveraging this type of savings with their actual products or […]