We are seeing more and more RISC-V microcontrollers and processors hitting the market, but so far they all lacked a GPU for 3D graphics acceleration. Think Silicon, the make of NEMA GPU for IoT and wearables, has now announced it will demonstrate NEOX|V GPU, the first RISC-V ISA based 3D, at the RISC-V Summit at the San Jose Convention Center, on December 10-12, in San Jose, California. NEOX|V key features: Parallel multi-core and multi-threaded architecture based on the RISC-V64GC ISA instruction set with adaptive NoC (Networks-on-Chip) Configurable from 4 to 64 cores Variety of cache sizes and thread counts organized in 1 to 16 cluster elements Variety of cluster/core configurations with compute power ranging from 12.8 to 409.6 GFLOPS at 800 MHz Support for FP16, FP32, and FP64 plus SIMD instructions Beside 3D graphics, the RISC-V GPU can also be used for machine learning, vision/video processing, and open GPGPU compute […]
AWS EC2 6th Gen Instances are 7x Faster thanks to Graviton 2 Arm Neoverse N1 Custom Processor
Last year Amazon introduced their first 64-bit Arm-based ECS2 “A1” instances which were found to deliver up to 45% cost savings over x86 Instances for the right workloads. A few months ago, AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides a new offering with bare-metal A1 instances, and with re:invent 2019 now taking place the company has unveiled AWS ECS2 6th generation Arm instances (which they did not call A2 instances yet) powered by Graviton 2 processor comprised of custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores and promising up to 7x the performance of the original A1 instances. There will be three types of Graviton2-powered EC2 instances with the d suffix indicating NVMe local storage: M6g and M6gd for General Purpose workloads (application servers, mid-size data stores, microservices, and cluster computing) with 1 to 64 vCPUs and up to 256 GB of memory. C6g and C6gd for Compute-Optimized workloads (high-performance computing, video encoding, gaming, and […]
Western Digital Made RISC-V Linux & BusyBox Boot on Sipeed Maix Go Board
The other day we wrote about Getting Started with Embedded Linux on RISC-V in QEMU emulator and noted that Linux capable RISC-V hardware is currently fairly expensive. We also mentioned there was work on porting uCLinux to Kendryte K210 RISC-V processor on boards such as Sipeed Maix board. The processor only comes with 8MB RAM, and does not feature an MMU (Memory Management Unit) so what you’d be able to do on the board would be limited, and for instance, a desktop environment is clearly impossible on the platform. NOMMU support also requires some extra work, and in Linux 5.4 we saw only of the changes was “SiFive PLIC IRQ chip modifications, in preparation for M-mode Linux”. The slide above is extracted from the “RISC-V NOMMU and M-Mode Linux” presentation by Damien Le Moal, Western Digital at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 last September. It explains M-mode support is better […]
Run Raspberry Pi 4 Cooler with a New Firmware & One Easy Trick
Raspberry Pi 4 launched last June with a lot of buzz as it offered much better performance, more memory, and faster I/Os compared to Raspberry Pi 3 model B+. Benchmarks confirmed the improved performance but also revealed a heatsink was necessary to ensure optimal performance under heavy loads. Some companies also launched an oversized heatsink+fan combo for the board, but it’s really over the top and absolutely not necessary unless possibly in higher room temperature (50°C?). The Raspberry Pi Foundation also worked on improving the video to lower CPU temperature and power consumption, and a few days later released a beta version of VLI firmware that dropped the temperature by 3 to 5°C. Good effort but sadly the updated VLI firmware (used for the PCIe to USB controller) also had the side-effect of much slower USB performance. A new VLI firmware was released in September offering both a lower temperature […]
Orange Pi 4/4B Board with RK3399, 4GB RAM Launched for $50 and Up
Orange Pi 4 is yet another Rockchip RK3399 SBC with 4GB RAM, while Orange Pi 4B adds Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801A AI Accelerator. Both models were announced about 10 days but were not for sale just yet. The company has now launched the board on both Aliexpress and their newly opened Amazon store with three options: Orange Pi 4 with no eMMC flash – $49.90 Orange Pi 4 with 16GB eMMC flash – $59.90 Orange Pi 4B with 16GB eMMC flash, Gyrfalcon NPU – $69.90 Quick reminder of Orange Pi 4/4B specifications: SoC – Rockchip K3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two Arm Cortex A72 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.1 support, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL and DX 11 System Memory – 4 GB LPDDR4 Storage – Optional 16 GB eMMC flash, micro SD card NPU (Orange Pi 4B only) – Gyrfalcon […]
Huawei Kunpeng Desktop Board is Powered by Kunpeng 920 Armv8 Server Processor
Huawei Kunpeng 920 is an Armv8 server SoC with up to 64 cores that can be found in the company’s TaiShan series servers. But the company has now designed “Kunpeng Desktop Board” featuring the quad or octa-core version of Kunpeng 920 SoC, in order to create Arm-powered desktop computers. Kunpeng Desktop Board (model D920S10) preliminary specifications: Processor – Kunpeng 920 processor with 4/8 cores at up to 2.6 GHz System Memory – 4x DDR4-2400 UDIMM slots for up to 64 GB RAM Storage – 6x SATA 3.0 hard drive interfaces, 2x M.2 SSD slots Connectivity – 2x LOM (LAN on Motherboard) NIC supporting Gigabit Ethernet network ports or optical ports USB – 4x USB 3.0 and 4x USB 2.0 ports Audio – Combo with 3x 3.5mm audio jacks Serial – DB9 connector Expansions – 1x PCIe 3.0 x16, 1x PCIe 3.0 x4, and 1x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots LOM Network […]
Sponsored: Black Friday Sale – Window 10 Pro for just $13
VIP-SDCKEY has been offering game and software keys as far back as 2008, and with Black Friday taking place now, they are offering some good deals for Microsoft Windows 10 and/or Office 2016 OEM keys when using the coupon code: VIPCNX12. Some of the deals include: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM CD-KEY GLOBAL sale price:$13.00 (after 12% coupon code VIPCNX12) Microsoft Office 2016 Professional Plus CD Key Global sale price:$ 32.39 (after 12% coupon code VIPCNX12) Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus CD Key Global sale price:$ 52.03 (after 12% coupon code VIPCNX12) Windows 10 Pro + Office 2016 Pro CD key sale price: $ 36.32 (after 12% coupon code VIPCNX12) Windows 10 Pro + Office 2019 Pro CD key: sale price: $ 59.88 (after 12% coupon code VIPCNX12) To use the keys you need to download and install Windows 10 or Microsoft Office before applying the code. All keys are permanent OEM keys purchased directly from an official Microsoft’s agent, and not so-called Volume License keys. This type of OEM keys has been sold for over […]
Arbor M1016 10.1″ Medical-Grade Tablet Targets Infotainment & Kiosk Applications
Arbor M1016 Healthcare & Kiosk Tablet Arbor offers various products in the embedded systems field, automotive IoT and healthcare infotainment, as well as patient interfaces for hospitals. The M1016, a 10.1″ Healthcare Infotainment Terminal is a soon to be released alternative to the company’s HTab. Previous Articles for Arbor HTab healthcare bedside patient entertainment tablet and the IoT-800N Automotive Panel PC have both been reported on in previous articles about Arbor market entrants. The Basics and Kiosk Design The M1016 runs an Arm Cortex-A35 CPU @ 1.5GHz, that supports Android 8.1, and offers a variety of features for many of the different capabilities of patients under care. The design is based on a Kiosk model, with an a-la-carte menu arrangement. Access and Power Consumption The unit itself is fanless with low power requirements that lend themselves well to thin enclosure design and ease of use. The GPU is a Mali-G31 […]