UP AI Edge Enables Artificial Intelligence on the Edge with Intel CPU, GPU, VPU and FPGA Solutions (Crowdfunding)

UP-Squared AI Vision Development Kit

Back in February of this year, AAEON introduced their UP AI Edge family of products with UP AI Core mini PCIe card based on Intel Movidius Myriad 2 VPU (Vision Processing Unit), and UP Core Plus board powered by a choice of Apollo Lake processors, and supporting AI Plus FPGA and AI Net Ethernet expansion boards. The company has now launched a Kickstarter campaign for those boards, and added several new products including Vision Plus with three Movidius Myriad 2 VPUs, AI Core M2 with two Movidius Myriad2 VPU in M.2 2280 form factor, as well as the Up Squared AI vision development kit for OpenVINO toolkit. I won’t go through the products announced in February, but let’s have look at the new boards and cards. Vision Plus Board Vision Plus Specifications: VPU – 3x Intel Movidius Myriad 2 VPUs with 512 MB DDR Connectivity – 1x Gigabit Ethernet USB […]

FriendlyELEC Launches a Rockchip RK3399 SBC for $129. Meet NanoPC-T4

Earlier this year, we have a number of SBCs based on Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor from Orange Pi RK3399 to ODROID-N1, or Pine64 RockPro64 boards. FriendlyELEC has joined the fray with their NanoPC-T4, which they claim is the  the smallest RK3399 based high-performance ARM board. The SBC comes with 4GB RAM, 16GB eMMC flash,  dual-band WiFi module and an  M.2 PCIe interface with  NVME SSD support. NanoPC-T4 board specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa core big.LITTLE processor with two Arm Cortex-A72 cores up to 2.0GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.5GHz, and a Mali-T864 GPU withsupport for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL, DX11, and AFBC System Memory – 4GB dual channel LPDDR3 Storage –  16GB eMMC 5.1 flash, M.2 slot for NVMe SSD,  1x microSD slot Display / Video Output HDMI 2.0a up to 4K @ 60Hz withHDCP 1.4/2.2 DisplayPort 1.2 Alt Mode on USB Type-C LCD I/F – 1x eDP […]

Intel NUC Kit NUC7PJYH Review – An Intel Gemini Lake Pentium Silver J5005 Barebone Mini PC

When Intel released their latest NUC Gemini Lake mini PCs they prioritized cost over performance. As a result the processor they chose for the ‘Intel NUC 7 Essential’ mini PC is somewhat underwhelming. Fortunately they released another model in the series, the rather misleadingly named ‘Intel NUC Kit NUC7PJYH’ which is is actually a ‘barebones’ mini PC just needing a stick or two of RAM and an SSD for storage. It contains an Intel Pentium Silver Processor J5005 SOC which is a quad core processor bursting up to 2.80 GHz together with a slightly more powerful Intel UHD Graphics 605 processor that is capable of 4K support at 60Hz. Visually it is no different to the Celeron NUC reviewed earlier in that it is physically small consisting of an approximately 4.5″ square case about 2″ tall with a distinctive front panel that includes the power button and a couple of […]

Running out of RAM in Ubuntu? Enable ZRAM

htop-zram

Whenever I ran out of RAM on a Linux system, I used to enable swap memory using the storage device to provide an extra bit of memory.  The main advantage is that it’s does not require extra hardware, but come at the cost of much slower access, and potential issues or wear and tear, unless you only use it temporary. This week-end, I compiled Arm Compute Library on ODROID-XU4Q board, and the first time it crashed because the system ran out of memory, so I enable swap on the eMMC flash module to restart and complete the build successfully. However, I was told it would have been better to enable ZRAM instead. So what is ZRAM? Wikipedia explains: zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk, but with on-the-fly “disk” compression. So it’s similar to swap, expect […]

How to Run Chrome OS in Android Emulator

Chrome-OS-Emulator

While it’s possible to run the open source Chromium OS in your computer or a virtual machine, AFAIK there was only was way to test Chrome OS: purchasing an actual Chromebook, or other device running the operating system. But this week-end, I read the news that Chrome OS was now available in Android Studio, and you can run in Android Emulator while emulating a Pixelbook, so I gave it a try by following the instructions on Android Developer website. If you haven’t done so already, we first need to install Android Studio. I’m running Ubuntu 16.04 in my computer, but this will also work in Windows and Mac OS X. After download the IDE zip file, we can extract it… and then open a console, go into “{installation home}/bin” and run the program:

After a few seconds, we got into Android Studio 3.1.2 welcome screen. We can now click […]

How to Get Started with OpenCL on ODROID-XU4 Board (with Arm Mali-T628MP6 GPU)

ODROID-XU4-OpenCL-Convolution

Last week, I reviewed Ubuntu 18.04 on ODROID-XU4 board testing most of the advertised features. However I skipped on the features listed in the Changelog: GPU hardware acceleration via OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2 drivers for Mali T628MP6 GPU While I tested OpenGL ES with tools like glmark2-es2 and es2gears, as well as WebGL demos in Chromium, I did not test OpenCL, since I’m not that familiar with it, except it’s used for GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) to accelerate tasks like image/audio processing. That was a good excuse to learn a bit more, try it out on the board, and write a short guide to get started with OpenGL on hardware with Arm Mali GPU. The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to run an OpenCL sample, and OpenCL utility, and I won’t go into the nitty gritty of OpenCL code. If you want to learn more […]

Newport GW6400/GW6404 Arm SBC Comes with 5 Gigabit Ethernet Ports, 2 SFP Fiber Ports, and 4 mPCIe Sockets

Gateworks-Newport-GW6400

Gateworks introduced their Newport SBC family based on Cavium Octeon TX Dual/Quad Core Arm processors at the end of last year, and the company has now announced the availability of the higher end models of their networking single board computers with Newport GW6400 & GW6404, which  provide four mPCIe sockets for expansion, five Gigabit Ethernet ports, and in the case of GW6404, two optional SFP cages for fiber connections. GW6400 / GW6404 specifications: SoC GW6400 – Cavium OcteonTX CN8120 dual core processor up to 800MHz GW6404 – Cavium OcteonTX CN8130 quad core processor up to 1.5 GHz System Memory GW6400 – 1 GB DDR4 DRAM GW6404 – 2 GB DDR4 DRAM Storage – 8 GB eMMC Flash , micro SD card slot, serial configuration EEPROM Connectivity 5x GbE Ethernet ports GW6404 – Up to 2x optional SFP fiber ports (redirect of one or two of the RJ45 ports to SFP […]

Vorke V5 Plus Kaby Lake Mini PC Review with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04

The Vorke V5​ Plus​​ mini PC​ just goes to show how initial impressions can be very misleading. Arriving in a plain manila-coloured box with the protection film on the top of the ​device starting to peal​-​off the minimalist contents ​only ​included a round-pin (European?) power supply and a small B&W ‘user’ manual. The mini PC ​has an Intel Celeron Processor 3865U from the Kaby Lake mobile range which is a dual-core (dual-thread) non-turbo 1.8GHz processor. However this SoC also includes an Intel HD Graphics 610 processor capable of 4K support at 60Hz through DisplayPort, ​although only 4K@24Hz on HDMI (1.4). Additionally ​the SoC​ supports DDR4 RAM in dual-channel configuration. The V5 Plus ​model ​which​ comes with ​both ​​memory and storage although it is sold without them as a ​barebones V5 model. Physically the V5 looks similar to a NUC and the pre-populated V5 Plus ​included a single SODIMM stick of […]

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