Beelink J45 Mini PC Review – Windows 10 Works as Expected, but Linux is Unstable

Beelink J45 Windows 10 OK, Linux Fails

[Update December 14, 2019: We’ve now found out that Ubuntu 18.04 can work fine on Beelink J45, but the Realtek Ethernet driver needs to be manually installed] Beelink has added a new mini PC to their ‘Gemini’ range (X45 and X55) namely the Beelink J45 (aka Beelink Gemini J45). What is rather unusual about the naming of this mini PC is that it uses the slightly older Intel Apollo Lake Pentium J4205 CPU which is a quad-core 4-thread 1.50 GHz processor boosting to 2.60 GHz with Intel’s HD Graphics 505. The J45 is another ‘NUC’ style mini PC and physically consists of a 115 x 102 x 43 mm (4.53 x 4.02 x 1.69 inches) box case with a front panel that includes the power button, a headphone jack and a couple of USB 3.0 ports and then on the rear, two more USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI (1.4)ports up […]

Khadas VIM3 Linux Benchmarks and Comparison to Raspberry Pi 4

Khadas VIM3 Heatsink Fan

I received Khadas VIM3 Amlogic A311D SBC in early July and started testing it with Android running some benchmarks and playing games last month. I was impressed by graphics performance and overall benchmark results in Android, especially the results I got with a heatsink matched Khadas own results with heatsink + fan. So I installed the latest Ubuntu 18.04 available at the time (July 19) in order to repeat benchmarks in Linux and see how it goes. System info in Ubuntu 18.04:

I decided to install armbianmonitor to draw some nice temperature charts as I did with Raspberry Pi 4:

But I had some error during installation:

And while I can load the webpage with top menu appearing, it won’t show any data, as its name implies it may only work in Armbian. SBC Bench on Khadas VIM3 Let’s download SBC bench:

Note that I had […]

UNISOC Tiger T710 Processor with NPU for AI Edge Applications Tops AI-Benchmark Leaderboard

Tiger T710

Last April, UNISOC introduced Tiger T310 quad-core Cortex-A75/A55 processor for 4G Phone, and the company has now added a new member to their Tiger family with T710 octa-core processor with four Cortex-A75 cores, four Cortex-A55 cores, and a dedicated NPU (Neural-network Processing Unit) for artificial intelligence applications at the edge in the industry, commerce, medical care, home, and education sectors. The company did not setup a product page, so information is really limited. Known features & specifications so far: CPU – 4x Arm Cortex-A75 cores at up to 2.0GHz, 4x Arm Cortex-A55 cores @ 1.8GHz NPU – Heterogeneous dual-core architecture NPU delivering 2.5TOPS per watt GPU – Imagination Technologies PowerVR GM9446 GPU also found in MediaTek Helio P90. The processor supports multiple AI framework formats, including TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, Caffe, and multiple AI data formats such as quantization (INT4, INT8, INT16) and floating-point (FP16). Tiger T710 also works with Android […]

Beelink GT-King (Amlogic S922X) TV Box Review

Beelink GT-King YouTube App

Rant Karl here. I have been playing around with Android boxes for several years. Unfortunately, some fundamental issues from when I first started playing around with these boxes are still there. They have come a long way since the MK808 with Rockchip RK3066 processor. The MK808 was my first endeavor into Android on the TV in 2013.  I can’t believe it’s been nearly 6 years. In 2014 Google introduced Android TV and the Nexus Player. It was designed for a TV and controller. The first boxes/sticks adapted the stock Android experience to run on a TV, but without a touch interface the experience was/is not optimal. Sure you get thousands and thousands of apps but a lot of them don’t work. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed much. If these boxes came with Linux and Android I don’t think I would complain as much. I would consider it a tinkering box. But […]

Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 Schedule – IoT, AI, Optimizations, Compilers and More

Linaro Connect San Diego 2019

Linaro has recently released the full schedule of Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 that will take place on  September 23-27. Even if you can’t attend, it’s always interested to check out the schedule to find out what interesting work is done on Arm Linux, Zephyr OS, and so on. So I’ve created my own virtual schedule with some of the most relevant and interesting sessions of the five-day event. Monday, September 23 14:00 – 14:25 – SAN19-101 Thermal Governors: How to pick the right one by Keerthy Jagadeesh, Software Engineer, Texas Instruments With higher Gigahertz and multiple cores packed in a SoC the need for thermal management for Arm based SoCs gets more and more critical. Thermal governors that define the policy for thermal management play a pivotal role in ensuring thermal safety of the device. Choosing the right one ensures the device performs optimally with in the thermal budget. […]

TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers Benchmarked on Linux SBCs

TensorFlow Lite microcontrollers benchmark linux SBC

Dimitris Tassopoulos (Dimtass) decided to learn more about machine learning for embedded systems now that the technology is more mature, and wrote a series of five posts documenting his experience with low-end hardware such as STM32 Bluepill board, Arduino UNO, or ESP8266-12E module starting with simple NN examples, before moving to TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers. Dimitris recently followed up his latest “stupid project” (that’s the name of his blog, not being demeaning here :)) by running and benchmarking TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers on various Linux SBC. But why? you might ask. Dimitris tried to build tflite C++ API designed for Linux, but found it was hard to build, and no pre-built binary are available except for x86_64. He had no such issues with tflite-micro API, even though it’s really meant for baremetal MCU platforms. Let’s get straight to the results which also include a Ryzen platform, probably a laptop, for […]

Amlogic S912 vs Amlogic A311D/S922X-B Benchmarks Comparison

S922X-B vs S912

A few days ago we compared Amlogic A311D to Rockchip RK3399 since both the top-of-the-line processors from Amlogic and Rockchip are currently available. Rockchip RK3588 will even be faster, but we need to wait until Q1 2020 at least before it becomes available, and delays are not unheard of, so I’d expect it may take about one year before I can get my hands on a sample. Another comparison is against Amlogic S912, the previous high-end processor from the company. Amlogic A311D and S922X-B are newer and will be faster but it’s interesting to find out just how much. Note the Amlogic S922X found in ODROID-N2 is clocked at a lower speed compare to A311D/S922X-B, so performance will be somewhat lower. Since I recently benchmarked Khadas VIM3 with Amlogic A311D processor, I decided to dust off my old Khadas VIM2 Amlogic S912 development board, fit it a large heatsink, install […]

5W Intel Tiger Lake-Y Series Processor with Gen12 UHD Graphics Benchmarked

The current high-performance low power 5W Intel processors are part of Amber Lake family, which will be followed by Comet Lake in 2020, and Tiger Lake in 2021 according to a roadmap leaked a few months ago. It looks a little too early for this, but NotebookCheck.net reports an unnamed Intel Tiger Lake Y-series processor has showed up in UserBenchmarks website. The system is said to feature an “Intel TigerLake Y LPDDR4x T4 Crb” motherboard, with an “Intel Tiger Lake Client Platform” coupled with 12GB DDR4 memory. The processor is only named “Intel 000” and comes with 4 cores, 8 threads having a base clock of 1.2 GHz, and an (average) Turbo clock of 2.9 GHz.  The SoC also comes with a Gen12 Intel UHD Graphics, but the computer also features a much faster AMD RX 580 graphics cards so bear this in mind if you’re looking at graphics benchmarks. […]