Giveaway Week – Orange Pi R1S Kit

Orange Pi R1 Plus Black ABS Case

Day 4 of giveaway week will be another product sent directly from the manufacturer, as Shenzhen Xunlong Software agreed to send an Orange Pi R1 Plus kit for free to a randomly selected winner. Just like the FriendlyELEC’s NanoPi R2S we’ve offered earlier this week, Orange Pi R1 Plus comes with a Rockchip RK3328 processor and dual Gigabit Ethernet, as well as 1GB RAM.  The kit also includes a plastic enclosure. While I did not have the opportunity to test the board myself, James Dawson did, and found both Ethernet ports to achieve close to Gigabit Ethernet speed, with the processor delivering decent performance.  Software-size, Shenzhen Xunlong Software provides Ubuntu, Debian, OpenWrt, and even Android images on the resources page, but some people also managed to run the Armbian image for NanoPi R2S or RockPi E boards. To enter the draw simply leave a comment with your country and whatever […]

LattePanda 3 Delta SBC combines Celeron N5105 SoC with Arduino (Crowdfunding)

LattePanda 3 Delta

LattePanda 3 Delta is the new version of the x86 + Arduino board introduced in 2015 with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 processor, and followed by LattePanda Alpha/Delta in 2017 with respectively Kaby Lake and Gemini Lake processors. The new LattePanda 3 Delta brings some serious performance boost with an Intel Celeron N5105 quad-core Jasper Lake processor that doubles the CPU performance, triples the GPU speed, and enables smooth 4K HDR video playback. Plus no vaccine is required that for that delta variant! 😉 LattePanda 3 Delta specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron N5105 quad-core Jasper Lake processor @ 2.0GHz / 2.9GHz (Turbo) with Intel UHD graphics 605; 10W TDP System Memory – 8GB LPDDR4 @ 2933 MHz Storage 64GB eMMC flash M.2 M Key socket for NVMe SSD M.2 B Key socket for SATA SSD MicroSD card socket MCU – Arduino Leonardo compatible Video Output HDMI 2.0 DisplayPort via USB Type-C […]

Beelink U59 Review – Windows 11, Ubuntu on a Jasper Lake mini PC

Beelink U59 review

Coupling a German submarine with a North American lake seems a perfect match in this topsy-turvy supply-constrained COVID-19 broken world we find ourselves in but that’s just what Beelink has figuratively done by launching their new Intel Jasper Lake mini PC, the U59. Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows 11 and Ubuntu 20.04. Beelink U59 Hardware Overview The Beelink U59 physically consists of a 124 x 113 x 42mm (4.88 x 4.45 x 1.65 inches) square plastic case. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses Intel’s new 10 nm Jasper Lake N5095 processor which is a quad-core 4-thread 2.00 GHz Celeron processor boosting to 2.90 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics. The front panel has an illuminated power button, dual USB 3.1 ports, a Type-C USB 3.0 port with DisplayPort Alternate Mode, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a reset pin-hole ‘CLR CMOS’. […]

Linux 5.15 LTS release – Main Changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.15

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.15, an LTS version, this past Sunday: It’s been calm, and I have no excuse to add an extra rc, so here we are, with v5.15 pushed out, and the merge window starting tomorrow. Which is going to be a bit inconvenient for me, since I also have some conference travel coming up. But it’s only a couple of days and I’ll have my laptop with me. Sometimes the release timing works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.. Anyway, the last week of 5.15 was mainly networking and gpu fixes, with some random sprinkling of other things (a few btrfs reverts, some kvm updates, minor other fixes here and there – a few architecture fixes, couple of tracing, small driver fixes etc). Full shortlog appended. This release may have started out with some -Werror pain, but it calmed down fairly quickly and on the whole 5.15 was […]

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Radxa Zero – Features and benchmarks comparison

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Radxa Zero

The just-announced Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is not the first quad-core Arm SBC following Raspberry Pi Zero form factor, and back in 2017, the Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero was introduced for $15, and the Radxa Zero was unveiled last June with an Amlogic S905Y2 SoC with price starting at $15 as well. With its Allwinner H2+ quad-core Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 1 GHz and a price bumped up to $23, the Banana Pi M2 Zero has mostly become irrelevant, but the Radxa Zero may still be considered by some people with a 1.8 GHz processor, and options for up to 4GB RAM, so let’s see how features compare against Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, followed by some benchmark numbers. Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Raxda Zero – Features If we just look at the comparison table, the Radxa Zero is equivalent or superior in almost every way, except […]

Giveaway Week – NanoPi R2S gateway

NanoPi R2S Giveaway

Here’s the 8th edition of CNX Software giveaway week! I’ll have seven items to give away to readers in the 2021 event with some help from two companies as I was short on available samples this year. We’ll start with NanoPi R2S gateway based on Rockchip RK3328 SoC, and equipped with 1 GB DDR4 RAM as well as two Gigabit Ethernet ports. I reviewed NanoPi R2S gateway at the end of last year with Armbian built Ubuntu 20.04 Focal, and it performed well under load thanks to the metal enclosure and optimized OS. The main downside is having a USB 2.0 port, especially if you intend to use it as external storage, but that’s the cost of having two Gigabit Ethernet ports on Rockchip RK3328 SoC, with one of those using the USB 3.0 interface. The giveaway includes the board and metal enclosure. It is already fully assembled. So you’ll […]

Build an open source-hardware Allwinner D1s RISC-V Linux SBC for under $10

cheap Allwinner D1s RISC-V SBC

We covered Allwinner D1s RISC-V processor with 64MB built-in RAM a few days ago, and we’ve just found out about Xassette-Asterisk, an open-source hardware board based on the processor that runs Linux (OpenWrt) and is said to cost less than $10 to make. This is significantly cheaper than the Allwinner D1 based Nezha RISC-V Linux SBC currently sold for a little over $100, a rather poor value. The cheaper board will not quite have the same applications with just 64 MB RAM and no HDMI, but it could be great for projects requiring a camera and/or a display, audio interfaces, plus some I/Os. Xassette-Asterisk specifications: SoC – Allwinner D1s single-core 64-bit RISC-V processor @ 1.008 GHz with 64MB DDR2 Storage – MicroSD card slot, 32 MBit SPI flash (W25Q32 – U2 on the board) Display I/F – 40-pin LCD connector, 6-pin touch panel interface, backlight power Camera I/F – 24-pin […]

Jetson SUB mini PC ships with Xavier NX SoM, 128GB SSD

Jetson SUB mini PC

Jetson SUB is a mini PC powered by NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module and equipped with a 512GB 128GB SSD, a WiFi module, all housed in an aluminum case with a cooling fan. [Update Nov 1, 2021: Seeed Studio informed me the SSD would only have 128 GB capacity] Preloaded with NVIDIA Jetpack, the mini PC is designed for higher-end edge AI and IoT workloads leveraging the 384 NVIDIA CUDA cores, 48 Tensor cores, the hexa-core Carmel 64-bit Arm processor, and the two NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerators (NVDLA) engines from the Xavier NX SoC. Jetson SUB mini PC specifications: NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module CPU – 6-core NVIDIA Carmel ARMv8.2 64-bit processor with 6 MB L2 + 4 MB L3 cache GPU – NVIDIA Volta architecture with 384 NVIDIA CUDA cores and 48 Tensor cores Accelerators – 2x NVDLA Engines, 7-Way VLIW Vision Processor Video – Multiple 4Kp60 encode, multiple […]