Tiger Canyon Porcoolpine fanless Tiger Lake NUC announced for $679 and up

Fanless Tiger Lake NUC

Simply NUC “Tiger Canyon Porcoolpine” is a fanless Intel NUC offered with a choice of Tiger Lake UP3 processors, notably Core i3-1115G4, Core i5-1135G7, and Core i7-1165G7, and equivalent vPro parts when available. The mini PC comes with up to 64GB DDR4, NVMe & SATA storage, a Thunderbolt 4 port, two HDMI 2.0b ports, 2.5 GbE networking, and optional Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, as well as a DB9 serial port for industrial applications, for example, to connect a barcode scanner. Tiger Canyon Porcoolpine (NUC11TF) specifications: SoC (one or the other) Intel Core i3-1115G4 dual-core/quad-thread processor @ up to 3.0 / 4.1 GHz (Turbo) with 6MB L3 cache, 48EU Intel Xe graphics; 28W TDP Intel Core i5-1135G7 quad-core/octa-thread processor @ up to 2.4 / 4.2 GHz with 8MB L3 cache, 80EU Intel Xe graphics; 28W TDP Intel Core i5-1145G7 (vPro) quad-core/octa-thread processor @ up to 2.6 / 4.4 GHz with […]

The first Arm SystemReady IR certified platforms – NXP i.MX 8M Mini EVK & Compulab IOT-GATE-IMX8 gateway

NXP EVK Arm SystemReady IR

A few months ago, we noted SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K became a certified Arm SystemReady ES platform. SystemReady is a certification program by Arm that ensures systems just work with generic operating systems like in the x86 world. When we looked at the details of the program in the article, we noted there were different categories including SystemReady ES for embedded servers and SystemReady IR for IoT Edge applications. The first SystemReady IR platform – NXP i.MX 8 Mini evaluation kit Arm has just announced the first SystemReady IR platform had just been certified. That device is the NXP i.MX 8M Mini EVK, and that means that anyone that uses the i.MX 8M family of devices with the associated Board Support Package (BSP) can build platforms that will pass the same certification process and boot compliant Linux distributions with minimal integration effort. We can see more details about the certifications on Arm developer’s website. NXP i.MX 8M Mini EVK achieved certification with NXP 2021 Q2 pre-release firmware, version LF […]

SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K becomes a certified Arm SystemReady ES platform

Arm SystemReady ES certified SBC

SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K is part of our list of the 5 most powerful Arm SBC’s in 2021. The mini-ITX board features an NXP LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex-A72 processor, supports up to 64GB RAM, offers high-speed networking thanks to up to 4x SFP+ 10GbE cages and a Gigabit Ethernet port, as well as four SATA ports, a PCIe x8 slot, M.2 SSD slot and more. The board is ideal for networking applications and can be also be integrated into an Arm workstation for native application development. But just last month, we noted that while SolidRun talked about SBSA compliance a while ago, the status was unclear. The good news is that HoneyComb LX2K has just now become a certified Arm SystemReady ES (Embedded Server) compliant platform. Arm SystemReady is a set of standards and a compliance certification program that ensures systems just work with generic, off-the-shelf operating systems straight out of […]

Top 5 most powerful Arm SBC’s & Devkits in 2021

Most Powerful Arm SBCs development kit 2021

While companies like Hardkernel, Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, and FriendlyArm offers affordable, great little Arm Linux development boards that are suitable for many projects, in some cases, your requirements may lead you to spend a bit more for either extra CPU power, more memory, AI processing power, faster I/Os and so on. That’s why I did a list of the most powerful Arm single board computers in late 2017, but with over three years passed since then an update is warranted. The boards from the list must be easily purchasable from individuals (with the cash to spare) or small companies, so we’ll exclude hard-to-source hardware, as well as Arm server boards like Ampere eMAG motherboard, that do not really qualify as single board computers. Snapdragon 888 Mobile Hardware Development Kit While there are plenty of Cortex-A72/A73 development boards around, it’s much hardware to find one with more recent Cortex-X1 or […]

SiFive launches HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard for RISC-V PC’s

When it comes to RISC-V based SoC, SiFive has always set a benchmark in the RISC-V ecosystem. On 29th October 2020, SiFive confirmed the first-ever RISC-V PC. After an increased demand for AI-focused RISC-V microarchitecture, targeting all applications from artificial intelligence, the internet of things, high-performance computing, and now even desktop PCs. SiFive Freedom U740 powered HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard comes with a complete development environment which allows developers to create RISC-V based applications from bare-metal to Linux-based systems. “HiFive Unmatched ushers in a new era of RISC-V Linux development with a platform in a PC form factor. Powered by the SiFive Freedom U740, a high-performance multi-core, 64-bit dual-issue, superscalar RISC-V processor.”, SiFive says. It is the world’s fastest native RISC-V development platform. SiFive HiFive Unmatched Board At the heart of the SiFive board is a SiFive FU740 processor coupled with 8 GB DDR4 memory and 32 MB SPI Flash. It […]

Banana Pi BPI-F2P Industrial Control Board Adds PoE, RS-232 and RS-485 Interfaces

Banana Pi BPI-F2P

At the end of Last year, we covered Banana Pi BPI-F2S Industrial SBC powered by Sunplus SP7021 “Plus1” SoC with four Cortex-A7 core, an Arm A926 microprocessor, an 8051 core, as well as 128MB to 512MB built-in DDR3 RAM. The company has now unveiled Banana Pi BPI-F2P with the same processor and many of the same features, but with the addition of PoE support on one of the Fast Ethernet ports, as well as an RS-232 DB9 connector, and RS-485 terminal blocks. The expansion connector for an FPGA board found in BPI-F2S is however gone. Banana Pi BPI-F2P specifications: SoC – Sunplus SP7021 “Plus1” with a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.0 GHz, one Arm A926 microprocessor, an 8051 core to handle I/Os, and 128MB or 512MB DDR3 DRAM. Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 output Camera I/F – MIPI CSI connector Connectivity – […]

Google Summer of Code 2020 Mentoring Organizations Announced

Google Summer of Code 2020

Every year Google organizes the Summer of Code inviting students to work on open-source projects and even get paid for it. The company first select mentoring organizations, before accepting applications from students. Google has now announced the 200 organizations/projects that have been selected for Summer of Code 2020. Many projects are higher-level software development such as web development or desktop programs development but there are also projects closer to the hardware-side of things with operating systems and multimedia projects. Some interesting organization and/or  projects part of the audio / graphics / video / multimedia category include: apertus Association developing AXIOM open-source hardware camera FFmpeg multimedia framework to decode, encode, transcode, de/mux, stream, filter & play audio and video stream found in many projects OpenCV Open Source Computer Vision Library for computer vision and deep learning applications. XOrg foundation for X Window System and related projects such as Mesa, DRI, Wayland, […]

Banana Pi BPI-F2S Industrial SBC Launched for $58 with Linux 4.19 based Debian or Fedora OS

Banana Pi BPI-F2S

Last month we covered Banana Pi BPI-F2S single board computer (SBC) for industrial, IoT, and smart audio application that was powered by the intriguing SunPlus SP7021 “Plus1” processor featuring four Cortex-A7 cores, one ARM9 ARM9 real-time core, and one 8051 I/O controller core, as well as up to 512MB built-in DDR3 RAM. At the time, the board was not available, and we had limited information about software support, except the company would provide a Yocto-based Linux distribution. The good news is that you can now buy Banana Pi BPI-F2S industrial SBC on Aliexpress for $58 and Taobao for 390 RMB, and the company released source code and OS images for the board. Here’s a reminder of Banana Pi BPI-F2S specifications: SoC – Sunplus SP7021 “Plus1” with a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.0 GHz, one Arm A926 microprocessor, an 8051 core to handle I/Os, and 128MB or 512MB DDR3 DRAM. Storage […]