arm News - Page 23 of 84 - CNX Software

October 8, 2020October 8, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Arm CPU Roadmap to 2022 – Matterhorn and 64-bit only Makalu CPU Cores

Arm Roadmap Peak Performance Matterhorn & Makalu

The Arm DevSummit 2020, previously known as Arm TechCon, is taking place virtually this week until Friday 9th, and besides some expected discussions about NVIDIA’s purchase of Arm, there have been some technical announcements, notably a high-performance CPU roadmap for the next two years, which will see Matterhorn (Cortex-A79?) in 2021, and Makalu (Cortex-A80?), the first 64-bit only Arm processor, in 2022. The company did not provide many details about the new cores, but they expected a peak performance uplift of up to 30% from the Cortex-A78 to the future Makalu generations. It should be noted that while performance keeps improving, the curve has flattened a bit. But the main announcement is that starting from 2022, all high-end Arm CPU cores (i.e. the “big” cores) will be 64-bit. So far, most Cortex-A cores supported both 32-bit (Aarch32) and 64-bit (Aarch64) architecture, and as we noted four years ago, the latter […]

September 30, 2020November 3, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Arm Announces Cortex-A78AE CPU, Mali-G78AE GPU & Mali-C71AE ISP for autonomous automotive & industrial applications

Arm has announced new CPU, GPU, and ISP specifically designed for autonomous automotive and industrial applications with respectively Cortex-A78AE CPU, Arm Mali-G78AE GPU, and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP. Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU Key features and specifications: Architecture – Armv8.2-A (AArch32 at ELO only) Extensions – Armv8.1, Armv8.2, and Armv8.3 extensions (LDAPR instructions only), RAS extensions, Armv8.4 Dot Product, Cryptography extensions, RAS extensions Microarchitecture Up to 4x CPU cores per cluster Out of order pipeline Neon / Floating Point Unit included with INT8 Dot Product and IEEE FP16 Optional Cryptography Unit 48-bit Physical Addressing (PA) Memory system and external interfaces 32kB to 64kB L1 I-Cache / D-Cache 256kB to 512kB L2 Cache Optional 512kB to 4MB L3 Cache ECC Support LPAE Bus interfaces – AMBA ACE or CHI Optional ACP, peripheral port Functional Safety Support – ASIL D Systematic1 and ASIL D Diagnostic2 Security – TrustZone Interrupts – External GICv4 Generic timer – […]

September 18, 2020September 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments

Arm Officially Supports Panfrost Open-Source Mali GPU Driver Development

Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide a particular bug is not important to them, so you’d be out of luck. So the developer community has long tried to reverse-engineer GPU drivers with projects like Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), Etnaviv (Vivante), as well as Lima and Panfrost for Arm Mali GPUs. Several years ago, Arm management was not interested at all collaborating with open-source GPU driver development for Mali GPUs, but as noted by Phoronix, Alyssa Rosenzweig, a graphics software engineer employed by Collabora, explained Panfrost development was now done in partnership with Arm during a talk at the annual X.Org Developers’ Conference (XDC 2020). A recent merge commit confirms the move with Daniel Stone, Graphics […]

September 14, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

NVIDIA to Acquire Arm for $40 Billion from Softbank

A few weeks ago, I read rumors about NVIDIA acquiring Arm, and I thought it was probably just a joke because of the obvious conflicts of interests since NVIDIA would be providing IP to competitors, who may then be wary of starting designs based on Arm NVIDIA cores and GPUs. But guess what? That’s now official with NVIDIA writing on their blog they had a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited from SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) and the SoftBank Vision Fund (together, “SoftBank”) in a transaction valued at $40 billion. I seldom write about business news, but it looks like in this case there may be repercussions. Let’s see details about the transaction: Under the terms of the transaction, which has been approved by the boards of directors of NVIDIA, SBG and Arm, NVIDIA will pay to SoftBank a total of $21.5 billion in NVIDIA common stock […]

September 6, 2020September 7, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Arrow Chameleon96 Arm + Cyclone V FPGA Board Sold for $32 (Promo)

First introduced in 2017, Arrow Chameleon96 96Boards SBC comes with an Intel / Altera Cyclone V SE SoC featuring a dual-core Arm Cortex A9 processor clocked at up to 800 MHz and FPGA fabric with 110K Logic Elements. It used to sell for $129, but Arrow & appears to have a promotion now where the Novtech board sells for just $31.34 with free shipping[Update: all available boards are gone, and the product is now out of stock]. It looks like a good opportunity for people interested in playing around with an Arm Linux FPGA platform. Here’s a reminder of Chameleon96 board specifications which the company shamelessly copied from CNX Software: SoC – Intel PSG / Altera Cyclone V SE 5CSEBA6U19I7N with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor @ up to 800 MHz and FPGA fabric with 110K Logic Elements Chips, Ports, and Features connected to FPGA: Integrated USB-Blaster II JTAG […]

September 4, 2020September 4, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Arm Cortex-R82 is a Linux Capable, 64-bit Real-time Processor for Computational Storage Applications

Arm hast just unveiled Cortex-R82 64-bit real-time processor that is Linux-capable and designed for “next-generation enterprise and computational storage solutions”. What’s computation storage? To clearly understand what we’re dealing, let’s first find out what computational storage is via SNIA website: Computational Storage is defined as architectures that provide Computational Storage Services coupled to storage, offloading host processing, or reducing data movement. A Computational Storage Service (CSS) is a data service or information service that performs computation on data where the service and data are associated with a storage device. So If I understand correctly, so far all we asked from SSD’s, hard drives, and other storage, was to move and store data as fast as possible to a host device capable any analyzing the data. But computational storage brings this to the storage device itself, so we may soon have Smart Hard Drives that run Linux and do some of […]

August 25, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

ZynqBerryZero Brings Xilinx Zynq-7010 FPGA SoC to Raspberry Pi Zero Form Factor

Trenz Electronic introduced ZynqBerry in 2017 as a Xilinx Zynq FPGA board following Raspberry Pi 2/3 Model B form factor, and the company has now just launched another Raspberry Pi inspired FPGA board with ZynqBerryZero following Raspberry Pi Zero form factor. ZynqberryZero is equipped with a Xilinx Zynq-7000 series FPGA & Arm Cortex-A9 SoC combined with 512 MB RAM and 16MB flash, and offers all Raspberry Pi Zero ports namely a 40-pin GPIO header, two micro USB ports, a mini HDMI connector, a CSI connector, and micro SD card slot. ZynqBerryZero specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq XC7Z010-1CLG225C with dual-core Cortex-A9 clocked up to 667 MHz, FPGA fabric with 28K logic cells, 2.1Mbit block RAM, and 80x DSP slices System Memory – 512 MB DDR3L SDRAM Storage – 16 MB Flash memory, MicroSD card slot Video Output – Mini HDMI connector, type C Camera – CSI-2 connector USB – 1x Micro […]

August 3, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Linux 5.8 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS, and RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.8: So I considered making an rc8 all the way to the last minute, but decided it’s not just worth waiting another week when there aren’t any big looming worries around. Because despite the merge window having been very large, there really hasn’t been anything scary going on in the release candidates. Yeah, we had some annoying noise with header file dependencies this week, but that’s not a new annoyance, and it’s also not the kind of subtle bug that keeps me up at night worrying about it. It did reinforce how nice it would be if we had some kind of tooling support to break nasty header file dependencies automatically, but if wishes were horses.. Maybe some day we’ll have some kind of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that can handle all our different architectures and configurations, but right now it’s just a manual […]