Category: ST Ericsson NovaThor

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on ST Ericsson NovaThor L8580 Dual Core Processor To Match big.LITTLE Quad Core Processors Performance and Power Consumption

ST Ericsson NovaThor L8580 Dual Core Processor To Match big.LITTLE Quad Core Processors Performance and Power Consumption

ST Ericsson already showcased NovaThor L8580 Cortex A9 processor @ 2.8 GHz at CES 2013. The processor features a technology called eQuad, and as I previously noticed there’s no mention of the number of cores at all on the website and many websites reported the processor featured 4 cores. The processor actually features 2 Cortex A9 core, but thanks to FD-SOI technology they are able to do the equivalent of a Quad Core big.LITTLE processor (i.e. 2x Cortex A15 + 2x Cortex A7) electrically. Since this is just done electrically, you can use the same software as before and will consume much less power, whereas big.LITTLE requires a lot of kernel work. A Cortex A9 will obviously be less powerful than a Cortex A15, but since they are able to boost the frequency up to 3GHz (probably limited to 2.5Ghz in actual product) this can compensate the lower performance, and […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Linaro 13.01 Release with Linux Kernel 3.8 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro 13.01 Release with Linux Kernel 3.8 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro has just announced release 13.01 which includes Linux Kernel 3.8-rc4 and Android 4.2.1. A lot of work seems to have gone in Arndale board and OpenEmbedded ARMv8. It’s the first time an Ubuntu image is released for Arndale Cortex A15 development board. One the kernel side some Android upstreaming work has been done, as well as some fixes for eMMC, and code for ST Ericsson Novathor 8500 SoC has been reorganized. Version 14 of the big.LITTLE MP (Multi Processing) has been released. The LEG has done further work on Linaro UEFI and GRUB. Here are the highlights of this release: Android Platform Work The first step of the android-build front-end update for new build program has been landed. Origen and Versatile Express manifests have been consolidated into a single manifest. linaro-android-tools were developed to improve development time for kernel developers. See Kernel Update Tools for details. The android-build scripts […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments on ST Ericsson Demonstrates NovaThor L8580 Multi Cortex A9 SoC @ 2.8 GHz

ST Ericsson Demonstrates NovaThor L8580 Multi Cortex A9 SoC @ 2.8 GHz

We’ve first heard about ST Ericsson NovaThor L8580 in July 2012, and the company demonstrated their new processor at CES 2013. This SoC features 4 (or is it 2?) Cortex A9 cores, and a PowerVR SGX544 GPU, but the real advantage of this processor is the new process technology called FD-SOI (Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator) which, combined with some other power and performance optimization techniques,  allows some fun stuffs such as: 2.8 GHz dual core operation 1 GHz operation at 0.63V instead of 1.1V when using bulk CMOS technology. You can see those 2 use cases in the video demo. In the first demo, a phone prototype based on L8580 @ 2.8Ghz is clearly faster than the Samsung Galaxy S3 based on Exynos 4412, and the second demo shows power measurement of the prototype when ran at 1GHz. Other key features of L8580: Low-power eQuad processor clocked at up […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments on Linaro 12.12 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro 12.12 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro release 12.12 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1. The tracking version (stable release) uses Kernel 3.4.22. This release upgrades Android to version 4.2.1, Ubuntu images are now based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and Linaro U-Boot 2012.12 has been released with support for Origen 4 Quad and Arndale boards. Further improvements have been done for OpenEmbedded ARMv8, where they replaced the php Apache module by php-fpm among other things. On the kernel side, USB drivers have been refactored, and a kernel size analysis have been performed on several platforms. The power management team has mainly worked on big.LITTLE IKS and MP implementations, and it’s the first time LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) is included in the release, and they worked on UEFI for ARM, GRUB for U-Boot, and provided a Ubuntu server image for Arndale board which can boot via UEFI or UBoot. Here […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments on Jolla Unveils Sailfish OS based on Meego and Sailfish SDK

Jolla Unveils Sailfish OS based on Meego and Sailfish SDK

Last July, a company called Jolly announced it would design, develop and sell smartphones based on the Meego operating system. This is now closer to reality as a demo has been showcased running on Nokia N950, except the operating system is now called Sailfish OS. Internally, Sailfish OS is built on top of the Mer project and Qt. The UI is built with QML and QtQuick and the standard QtMobility APIs are supported. For software development, you’ll need to use a special version of QtCreator. The development flow  looks very similar to what you would do to develop applications for Symbian or Harmattan phones. More precisely, the Sailfish SDK consists of QtCreator, a virtualised Mer Platform SDK and Sailfish components. Code is developed in Qt-Creator on the host device, then the code is passed to the virtualised Mer SDK where it compiles inside the Virtual Machine. If you want to […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linaro 12.09 Release with Kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.1

Linaro 12.09 Release with Kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.1

Linaro release 12.09 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.6-rc6 and Android Jelly Bean. This release provides further improvement to Android Jelly Bean, Android benchmark characterization,  an ARMv8 OpenEmbedded image, UEFI bootloader support for Vexpress, origen and pandabords, and some improvement to big.LITTLE and power management. Here are the highlights of the release: Android All Linaro patches are now available on Jelly Bean. Accelerated graphics is now available on Snowball Jelly Bean build. AndEBench, AndEBench Java, Linpack, CaffeineMark, Antutu 2D and 3D, NBench, Quadrant, I/O Benchmark, Vellamo benchmark hotspot characterization available. An Origen tracking build is available and will be released this cycle as a Linaro Evaluation Build (LEB). Audio works on Origen running Jelly Bean (WAV file only). A Monkeyrunner script to run Streamline has been completed. First rev of the NI PXIe-4154 based power measurement system is created. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKyuxLl4iw&feature=plcp In-tree AOSP tests have been automated. […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Linaro 12.08 Release with Kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean

Linaro 12.08 Release with Kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean

Linaro release 12.08 includes Linux Kernel 3.6-rc2 and is the very first release with Android Jelly Bean (4.1.1-R4). The Android platform team has managed to port Android Jelly Bean to all their main development platforms: Versatile Express, Versatile Express RTSM, Samsung Origen, TI PandaBoard, ST Ericsson Snowball, as well as Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. They’ve also added TINY_ANDROID, a minimal Android build that can be used for kernel development, toolchain work and other development where users only need a console. It’s possible to get the source code, build it and access the shell within 10 minutes. U-boot-Linaro has been updated and is now based on the latest upstream release v2012.07. Next month, we might be able to see a preliminary port of Android on 64-bit platform (ARMv8). Here are the highlights of the release: Android Automated Methanol (http://gitorious.org/methanol) browser benchmarking in Linaro Android. Automated over 100 Jelly Bean AOSP tests. […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.07 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4. Some work has been done on Jelly Bean (but the port is for next month), several benchmark tools have been added to LAVA as Linaro wants to provide standard benchmarks for Android, Linaro ALIP image now uses LXDE by default with a smaller image and improved performance, and Open Embedded images are now available (minimal and LAMP stack). Here are the highlights of the release: Android Jellybean baselines for Galaxy and Panda with Linaro extra’s available Android Benchmarking apps were deployed for pandaboard, snowball and origen in LAVA including: vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, andebench Improved native Benchmarks variance on Android to 1%, working on Java variance ICS “tests” builds now produced by default and test lists generated Open overlay tarballs working pm-qa’s cpuidle cpufreq cpuhotplug sched_mc suspend integrated into the Android builds Linaro […]

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