arm News - Page 31 of 84 - CNX Software

March 29, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 37 Comments

PINE64 Plans to Move their Website on a 24-node RockPro64 Cluster

Boards’ clusters are always fun to see, and PINE64 has shared pictures of two RockPro64 clusters with respectively 48 and 24 boards neatly packed into partially custom enclosures. The 48-node cluster will feature a total of 288 cores, including 96 Arm Cortex-A72 cores and 188 Cortex-A53 cores, as well as 192GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Low cost development boards may be seen as toys by some, so it’s interesting to learn that PINE64 plans to move their complete website infrastructure including the main website, a community website, forums, wiki, and possibly IRC on the 24-node cluster, while it seems the 48-node cluster may be used for their build environment. The company has just completed the assembly of the clusters, and did not disclose the full technical details just yet. However, a progress report may be written in due time. Once the migration is done, and everything works as it should, it […]

March 25, 2019March 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

PYNQ-Z2 Python FPGA Board Adds Raspberry Pi Header, 24-Bit Audio Codec

PYNQ-Z1 is a board by Digilent powered by Xilinx Zynq-7020 Arm Cortex-A9 + FPGA SoC that’s designed specifically for PYNQ, an open-source project that aims to ease the design of embedded systems with Xilinx Zynq Systems on Chips (SoCs) by leveraging the Python language and libraries. PYNQ-Z2 is very similar to PYNQ-Z1, but it’s made by Taiwanese company TUL, and the board is slightly longer to allow for an extra 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header, and Analog Devices ADAU1761 24-bit audio codec. PYNQ-Z2 board specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq-7020 (XC7Z020-1CLG400C) dual core Arm Cortex-A9 processor @ 650 MHz with FPGA with 13,300 logic slices, each with four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops System Memory – 512MB DDR3 Storage – Micro SD card slot, 16MB QSPI Flash with factory programmed globally unique identifier (48-bit EUI-48/64 compatible). Video – HDMI In and HDMI Out Audio – Mic in, Line Out ADAU1761 codec […]

March 4, 2019April 22, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 5.0 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.0: Ok, so the last week of the 5.0 release wasn’t entirely quiet, but it’s a lot smaller than rc8 was, and on the whole I’m happy that I delayed a week and did an rc8. It turns out that the actual patch that I talked about in the rc8 release wasn’t the worrisome bug I had thought: yes, we had an uninitialized variable, but the reason we hadn’t immediately noticed it due to a warning was that the way gcc works, the compiler had basically initialized it for us to the right value. So the same thing that caused not the lack of warning, also effectively meant that the fix was a no-op in practice. But hey, we had other bug fixes come in that actually did matter, and the uninitialized variable _could_ have been a problem with another compiler. Regardless – all […]

February 27, 2019January 7, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

NXP i.MX 8M Nano is a Power-optimized Arm Cortex-A53/M7 Processor

NXP introduced their first 14nm i.MX processor at Embedded World 2018 last year with i.MX 8 Mini processor equipped with up to four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz and one real-time Cortex-M4 cores clocked at 400+ MHz, and optional 1080p video output and decoding/encoding. The company has now added another 14nm member to their i.MX 8M family with NXP i.MX 8M Nano family also featuring four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.5 GHz, but replacing the Cortex-M4 by a more powerful Cortex-M7 core clocked at up to 600 MHz. The processor is also power-optimized for less than 2W total dynamic power (TDP) and sub-watt in many IoT edge applications. NXP i.MX 8M Nano key features and specifications: Application cores – One to four Arm Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.5 GHz per core; 32KB L1-I Cache/ 32 KB L1-D Cache; 512 KB L2 Cache Real-time core – Arm Cortex-M7 […]

February 26, 2019March 1, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Systems-on-Module Market Update – An Interview with Toradex CMO

I’ve been interviewing Daniel Lang, Toradex Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), over email just before Embedded World 2019, to learn a bit more about the system-on-module market, and what’s ahead. CNXSoft: We’ve already covered several Toradex systems-on-module and development kits on CNX Software, but for readers who may not know Toradex yet, could you provide a short description of what the company does in the embedded systems space? Daniel Lang: Thanks for having me. Toradex builds high reliable Arm-based System on Modules. Our focus is to make the life of developers easier and to reduce the complexity and time-to-market. We sell hardware, but most of our engineering resources focus on Software and Support. Our products are used in areas such as Industrial Automation, Medical, Transportation, Test and Measurement, Building Automation and many more. CNXSoft: Could you explain why / what type of customers go the SoM route instead of designing for […]

February 15, 2019February 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Arm Helium Delivers up to 15x Performance Uplift for Machine Learning on Cortex-M MCUs

Arm has just unveiled Armv8.1-M architecture that adds Arm Helium technology, the M-Profile Vector Extension (MVE) for the Arm Cortex-M cores that will improve the compute performance of Cortex-M based microcontrollers. Helium will deliver up to 15 times more machine learning (ML) performance and up to 5 times uplift to signal processing allowing local decision-making on low-power embedded devices. Helium instructions will enable new applications for Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers in audio devices, sensor hubs, keyword spotting, voice command control, power electronics, communications and still image processing. Helium and Neon (the Advanced SIMD technology for Arm Cortex-A processors) are similarities but Helium has been designed for efficient signal processing performance in small processors. One different illustrated below is that while NEON loads 128-bit instructions (e.g. VLDR, VLMA), Helium will split up 128‑bit wide instruction into four equally sized chunks, called “beats” (labelled A to D) due to difference between Cortex-M and […]

February 12, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 28 Comments

Ubuntu 18.04 Now Boots on Some Snapdragon 835 Arm Laptops

The first “proper” Windows 10 Arm laptops were unveiled at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, all based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with always-on LTE connectivity, 20+ hour battery life, a fairly expensive price tag, and somewhat underwhelming performance. Qualcomm was not interested in supporting Linux, but there was interest from the community, and now it seems Ubuntu 18.04 images are available for Lenovo Miix 630, HP Envy x2, and ASUS Novago TP370 thanks to Aarch64-laptop project currently hosted on Github. Now the prebuilt images are not really ready for end users since UFS storage and WiFi are not working on any laptop yet, the touchpad is not working on the ASUS laptop, and accelerated graphics needs to be implemented. Interestingly WiFi is related to UFS on those laptops, and Marc Gonzalez is said to be being actively worked on UFS upstream support, which should enable for […]