ARM Unveils Cortex A17 Processor, First Used in Mediatek MT6595 and Rockchip RK3288 SoCs

Finally all these ARM Cortex A17 marketing materials for Rockchip RK3288 were not some typos, but Rockchip marketing team may just have not received the memo reading “Confidential”, as ARM has now officially announced Cortex A17 processor based on ARMv7-A architecture, with support for big.LITTLE with Cortex A7, and that can be coupled with Mali-T720 mid-range GPU and Mali-V500 VPU. After Cortex A15, and Cortex A12, you may wonder “Why? But Why did ARM had to launch yet another new core?”. Here’s the company answer to that question: The Cortex-A17 processor offers 60% performance uplift over the Cortex-A9 processor, the current leader in mid-range mobile market, and betters the best efficiency enabling optimized solutions to address existing and new products. The Cortex-A17 processor is based on the popular ARMv7-A architecture, today’s most successful architecture in the mobile market. With over 1M apps supporting the ARMv7-A architecture, the Cortex-A17 processor is […]

AllGo Embedded Systems Android IVI System Boots in 4 Seconds

We’ve already seen several sub-second boot times for embedded Linux systems with platforms such as Beagleboard (TI OMAP 3530) and an AllWinner A10 based device, but I had never seen fast boot optimization for Android before, or I just forgot… Typically Android boots within 20 to 40 seconds on most devices, but AllGo Embedded Systems has optimized Android Jelly Bean boot time for their IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) platform running a media player called RACE. Charbax interviewed then at CES 2014, where they demoed the 4 seconds (actually 4.2 seconds) boot on Texas Instruments OMAP5 from reset and power, as you can see in the video below. (The video starts at 2:20 to show the demo directly). Beside Texas Instrument OMAP5, the solution is also available for Freescale i.MX6. 0xlab did some boot time optimizations for Android dropping the boot time from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. AllGo Embedded Systems did […]

NVidia Announces Tegra K1 32-bit & 64-bit SoCs with a 192 Core Kepler GPU

Nvidia announced their newest mobile SoC at CES 2014, but instead of calling it Tegra 5, they went for Tegra K1, as it’s the first to feature a 192 cores GPU based on Kepler architecture, the same as used in PC graphics card. There will be several version of the chip one based on four Cortex A15 cores, one featuring a dual core Nvidia Denver CPU based on ARMv8 64-bit architecture, and Tegra K1 VCM for the automotive market. The company showcased the power of their new processor with an Unreal Engine 4 demo and the same face demo showed last year on an Nvidia GPU card, and Tegra K1 easily outperform older generations games console such as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, at and the same time consume just about 5 Watts of power, versus 100 Watts for Microsoft and Sony consoles. The GPU in the Tegra K1 also […]

Mentor Embedded ARM Hypervisor Automotive Demo on Freescale i.MX6 Board

Virtual machines are usually run on server or desktop PC to run several operating systems simultaneous. About 2 years ago, I wrote about an embedded hypervisor running Linux and Android on the Pandaboard develompent board, with the goal of separating home and enterprise operating systems in mobile devices so that enterprise data is safe. Since then, virtualization extensions are now part of ARM Cortex A15 / A7, and as well as the new Cortex A53 / A57 ARMv8 64-bit cores, but in my mind at least, those where mostly designed to address the server market. It turns out hypervisors are also useful in the automotive field, where for example, the dashboard and In-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems runs in two separate virtual machines controlling two different displays from one processor. Mentor Embedded showcased such automotive system at ARM Techcon 2013, where they showed a Freescale i.MX6 quad core board, which looks […]

MEN Mikro Elektronik BL50W is an Embedded PC For Wireless Applications with up to 9 Antennas

MEN Mikro Elektronik Gmbh, a German company specialized in industrial embedded boards and systems, has recently unveils BL50W, an embedded PC powered by AMD G-Series APU targeting wireless applications for transportation: trains, buses, construction and agricultural machines or airplanes. The rugged device provides nine antenna slots, with support for up to 8 SIM cards and a GPS interface. BL50W Specifications: Processor – AMD G-Series single or dual core APU from AMD T24L to AMD T56N (13 Processor options). The standard version comes with AMG G-series T48N Dual Core processor @ 1.4 GHz with AMD Radeon HD 6310 GPU System Memory – 2GB DDR3 SDRAM (4GB optional) Storage – SD card slot, mSATA slot (Up to 3Gb/s), and SATA 3.0 (Up to 6Gb/s) Graphics – Radeon HD 6310 GPU by default with dual independent display support, dual DisplayPorts, and  2560×1600 maximum resolution. Video – Dedicated hardware (UVD 3) for H.264, VC-1 […]

ARM TechCon 2013 Schedule – ARM Servers, Internet of Things, Multicore, Hardware and Software Optimization and More

ARM Technology Conference (TechCon) 2013 will take place on October 29 – 31, 2013, in Santa Clara, and the detailed schedule for the event has just been made available. In the previous years, the conference was divided into  Chip Designs day (1 day), and the other 2 days were reserved for Software & System Design, but this year it does not appear to be the case. Whether you’ll be able to attend the event or not, it’s worth having a look at what will be discussed there in order to have a better understanding of what will be the key ARM developments in the near future in terms of hardware and software. There will be around 90 sessions categorized into 15 tracks: Accelerating Hardware Development – This track explores the resources, tools, and techniques that designers can employ to quickly bring hardware to market. Topics include multicore design, ARM IP, […]

Tizen Developer Conference 2013 Presentation Slides, Audio Recording and Videos Are Now Available

The Tizen Developer Conference took place in San Fransisco, on May 22-24, 2013. We’e already seen a few Tizen demos from the conference, but slides and media files (mostly audio, but also some videos) are now available for keynotes and technical presentations. As this was just the second Tizen conference, there were still many sessions dealing with overall structure of the operating system, and explaining how to get started either with native or web development, such as: An Overview of the Tizen Native Application Framework Introduction of Tizen SDK minimal web development tools Tizen Design Guidelines and User Experience Tizen Overview and Architecture Tizen.org Web Infrastructure Tizen enters a mobile world dominated by Android and iOS, so several sessions targeted app developers used to work with either operating systems in order to show them how to port their existing apps to Tizen: Bringing Android Apps to Tizen From iOS to […]

Renesas RZ/A1 Cortex A9 Processors Feature Up to 10 MB On-chip RAM

Renesas Electronics has recently introduced the RZ/A1 group of ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessors (MPUs) for automotive, consumer and industrial applications requiring user interfaces with displays with a resolution up to 1280×768 (WXGA). The RZ/A1 series will come in three product groups: RZ/A1H, RZ/A1M and RZ/A1L with respectively 10MB, 5MB and 3MB on-chip RAM. These Renesas SoCs are an upgrade to SH7260 Series. Key Features (Included in A1H and A1M, but not always in A1L): Core – ARM Cortex A9 @ up to 400 MHz (with Jazelle and NEON) GPU – OpenVG-compliant Renesas graphics processor (2D graphics) Cache – 32-Kbyte L1 instruction cache, a 32-Kbyte L1 data cache, and a 128-Kbyte L2 cache. Built-in memory –  Up to 10-Mbyte large-capacity RAM (128 Kbytes are shared by the data-retention RAM) for A1H, 5MB for A1M, and 3MB for A1L External memory Up to 66.67 MHz bus Direct connection to SRAM, byte select SRAM, […]

Exit mobile version
Memfault IoT and embedded debugging platform