Year 2022 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

CNX Software Happy New Year 2023

It’s the last day of the year and the time to look at some of the highlights of 2022, some traffic statistics from CNX Software website, and speculate on what 2023 may bring us. The semiconductors shortage continued in 2022, but things are looking brighter in 2023 with the full reopening of the world mixed with forecasts of difficult economic times that should keep the demand/supply equation in check. On the Arm processor front the biggest news of the year, at least in this corner of the Internet, was the launch of the Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor together with interesting single board computers that we’ll discuss below. Announced last year, the Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53 was finally made available in a few SBC’s, and we finally got some news about the Amlogic S928X Cortex-A76/A55 SoC showcased in 8K TV boxes, but we have yet to see it in action. […]

Linux 6.1 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.1 LTS

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.1, likely to be an LTS kernel, last Sunday: So here we are, a week late, but last week was nice and slow, and I’m much happier about the state of 6.1 than I was a couple of weeks ago when things didn’t seem to be slowing down. Of course, that means that now we have the merge window from hell, just before the holidays, with me having some pre-holiday travel coming up too. So while delaying things for a week was the right thing to do, it does make the timing for the 6.2 merge window awkward. That said, I’m happy to report that people seem to have taken that to heart, and I already have two dozen pull requests pending for tomorrow in my inbox. And hopefully I’ll get another batch overnight, so that I can try to really get as […]

MediaTek Kompanio 520 and Kompanio 528 processors targets entry-level Chromebooks

MediaTek Kompanio 528

MediaTek Kompanio 520 and Kompanio 528 octa-core Arm processors are designed for entry-level Chromebooks with all-day battery life and a display up to 2520 x 1080 resolutions. As time passes “entry-level” gets a new meaning as the new SoCs are equipped with two Cortex-A76 cores @ up to 2.2 GHz, six Cortex-A55 cores @ 2.0 GHz, and an Arm Mali-G52 GPU. That’s almost Rockchip RK3588 territory although not quite… MediaTek Kompanio 528 and 520 specifications: Octa-core CPU 2x Arm Cortex-A76 cores up to 2.2GHz (Kompanio 520 is limited to 2.0 GHz) 6x Arm Cortex-A55 cores up to 2GHz GPU – Arm Mali G52 MC2 2EE AI accelerator – Dual-core AI processing unit (APU) Memory –  LPDDR4x up to 3733Mbps Storage – eMMC 5.1 flash with hardware command queue Display 2520 x 1080 @ 60Hz 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz (Ext) Video Encoding – 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps H.264 or […]

Mekotronics LS1200 “live streaming” box is powered by MediaTek Genio 1200 SoC

Mekotronics LS1200

Mekotronics LS1200 is a mini PC powered by a MediaTek Genio 1200 (MT8395) octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 processor with a 4.8 TOPS NPU, and especially suited to live streaming applications. The system, housed in a metal enclosure, is offered with an unspecified amount of LPDDR4x memory and eMMC flash, HDMI input and output, an eDP (Embedded DisplayPort) interface, a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and four USB host ports. Mekotronics LS1200 specifications: SoC – MediaTek Genio 1200 (MT8395) octa-core processor with CPU – 4x Cortex-A78 cores @ 2.2GHz, 4x Cortex-A55 cores @ 2.2GHz GPU – Penta-core Arm Mali-G57 GPU @ 880MHz with support for OpenGL ES 3.2/2.0/1.1, Vulkan 1.1/1.0, OpenCL 2.2, AI accelerator – 4.8 TOPS dual NPU with support for TensorFlow and Caffe models DSP – HiFi 4 audio DSP VPU Encoding up to 4Kp60 with H.265/HEVC Decoding up to 4Kp90, AV1, VP9, HEVC, H.264 codecs supported System Memory […]

Linux 6.0 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.0 Release

Linux 6.0 has just been released by Linus Torvalds: So, as is hopefully clear to everybody, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any big fundamental changes. But of course there’s a lot of various changes in 6.0 – we’ve got over 15k non-merge commits in there in total, after all, and as such 6.0 is one of the bigger releases at least in numbers of commits in a while. The shortlog of changes below is only the last week since 6.0-rc7. A little bit of everything, although the diffstat is dominated by drm (mostly amd new chip support) and networking drivers. And this obviously means that tomorrow I’ll open the merge window for 6.1. Which – unlike 6.0 – has a number of fairly core new things lined up. But for now, please do give this most […]

Linux 5.19 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.19 release arm risc-v mips

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.19. It should be the last 5.xx version, with Linux 6.0 coming for the next cycle: So here we are, one week late, and 5.19 is tagged and pushed out. The full shortlog (just from rc8, obviously not all of 5.19) is below, but I can happily report that there is nothing really interesting in there. A lot of random small stuff. In the diffstat, the loongarch updates stand out, as does another batch of the networking sysctl READ_ONCE() annotations to make some of the data race checker code happy. Other than that it’s really just a mixed bag of various odds and ends. On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It’s something I’ve been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it’s finally reality, […]

Vecow unveils MediaTek Genio 350, Genio 500, and Genio 1200 system-on-modules and development kits

ESOM-MT-1200-CB

Vecow has announced a series of new system-on-modules and development kits based on Mediatek Genio 350, Genio 500, or Genio 1200 processors for AIoT applications ranging from smart security, smart retail, and traffic vision to digital signage. This follows last week’s news about ADLINK LEC-MTK-I12000 SMARC module and devkit powered by MediaTek Genio 1200 Cortex-A78/A55 AIoT processor, but Vecow also offers solutions based on the entry-level Genio 350 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, and the mid-range Genio 500 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor. ESOM-MT-350 Genio 350 system-on-module and devkit Specifications: SoC – MediaTek Genio 350 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 2.0GHz with Mali-G52 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL ES 2.0, and Vulkan 1.1, 1080p60 H.265/H.264 video decoder System Memory – 2GB LPDDR4 SDRAM Storage – 16GB eMMC flash Wireless – MT7668 WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 module with IPEX connector Audio – MediaTek MT6390/6357 audio codec Debugging – On-module debug console port […]

Panfrost now offers a fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for Mali-G57 (Valhall) GPU

Panfrost Mali-G57 OpenGL ES 3.1

The Mali-G57 GPU part of the Valhall family, and found in several Arm processors such as MediaTek MT8192 and MT8195 SoC powering some Chromebooks, is now supported by the Panfrost open-source driver with a fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation. Last year, Collabora updated Panfrost with support for OpenGL ES 3.1 on Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost (Mali G31, G52, G76) GPUs, and also announced having started working on Valhall GPUs. One part of the work was done in the summer of 2021 with some reverse-engineering work on Mali-G78 GPU’s instruction set, and this has culminated with a fully-conformant OpenGL3.1 for Mali-G57 GPU. Interestingly, it’s not been released by Collabora directly, but through an organization called “Software in the Public Intenerest, Inc.” (or SPI for shorts) which happens to be a non-profit organization incorporated on June 16, 1997, and described as: a non-profit corporation registered in the state of […]

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